Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence,by Garry Wills
Brookhiser, Richard
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence,by Garry Wills" love for humanity, but have little affection for Tom, Dick, and Harry. Nor should we forget that Mencken defended minority views (many of them abhorrent to his person) as well as minorities long...
...years 8. months, or say 19...
...Indeed, Americans were not "colonists" at all, but "emigrants...
...classic populist challenge—"all right we are two nations"—remains an evocative literary image but a totally misleading picture of American politics...
...Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration...
...The importance of the emigration theory to the original draft of the Declaration now becomes clearer...
...With a little less psycho, and a little more history, Erikson might have realized that all these elements were conventions of 18th-century descriptions of the "sublime...
...They must pardon us if we doubt their total indifference to what Shockley is saying...
...Meanwhile, despite early predictions and thanks to hundreds of thousands of readers determined to make up their own minds, RN has become a nationwide bestseller...
...But if Wills gets so hopped up over YAF (which, after all, wanted Shockley beaten), what will he have left someone who writes things like this?— Comparing [blacks] by their faculties of memory, reason and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to whites...
...Shockley, as everyone outside of Bhutan that season knew, believed that blacks were genetically less intelligent than whites, and that the government might be advised to consider eugenic measures...
...Buckley considered—"Hugh Kenner tells me it's not" —but hired him anyway...
...John Dos Passos' James A. Nuechterlein is associate professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario...
...Demagoguery issues naturally from populism's simplistic world view...
...He almost became a Methodist minister and did spend one summer as a student pastor...
...and Jefferson did not own a copy of the Treatises after 1815, perhaps even after 1770...
...That Britain's rule was oppressive and unjust, and that the colonies had therefore the right to throw it off, were commonplaces of the revolutionary party...
...Jefferson's fellow delegates were not persuaded, however, and in the final version the argument was cut—a bit of editorial license which Jefferson never forgave, and which he tried to emend by mailing copies of the first draft to his friends...
...The number twenty, however, was not lightly chosen...
...semi-fascism...
...George McGovern, as with all genuine populists, isn't very good at reality...
...Nixon's] voice continues to hypnotize...
...And no one saw more clearly than he that the vast majority of his fellows had little if any interest in either idea...
...Our ancestors," he declared in 1774, "before their emigration to America...possessed a right, which nature has given to all men...
...Similar reports indicate that, despite occasional rancorous attacks, RN has won nationwide acceptance as both a major historical document and as a highly personal memoir...
...At some point in their talk, Buckley asked Wills whether he was a conservative...
...10010 The American Spectator August/ September 1978 31 teaching were not living up to some ideal of Socratic self-evaluation, but down to the lowest common denominator of that era's politics...
...while anti-Communists put the myth of America's special mission, of which the Declaration has become the seminal symbol, to even more heinous uses—"napalm and saturation bombing...or a Chile putsch...
...The reason is simple: Populism's vision of a nation polarized between the poor but virtuous many and the powerful and selfish few can make little sense of an America dominated by a middle-class majority which is at least as concerned about disorder below as about oppression above...
...while his chief intellectual creditor was not Locke, but the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Smith, and Francis Hutcheson...
...mulatto" in a twenty-five-page description of a tour through Holland, concludes that Jefferson was already in emotional travail over his quadroon slave, Sally Hemmings...
...Nixon instantly attached itself to his book...
...Like most satirists, he was deeply concerned with the commonweal, and he fought all his life to protect what he called"the two greatest intellectual possessions of modern man"—to wit, "the idea of personal freedom and the idea of the limitation of government...
...In Dimensions of a New Identity, Erikson huffs and puffs over a description of the Natural Bridge in Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia: "note, if you please...the juxtaposition of height and downfall, of sublime emotions—and the violent pain in the head...
...years at the nearest integral number....Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years...
...Nixon's] record of his negotiations with the Soviets is fascinating...
...If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right...
...I first heard some of the ideas that found their way into Inventing America in the course of a Jefferson seminar Wills taught my freshman year at Yale...
...Wills explores a dozen other matters with like precision—how the Fourth became a holiday, though nothing was signed on it...
...Yet they have, as politicians, very little in common...
...why Jefferson opposed both slavery and individual manumission...
...The dynamic force behind McGovern was not America's plain folk, however defined...
...Wills' prose gets a little woozy here—who is he calling semi-fascist...
...Wills perhaps has most fun with careless psychohistorians...
...Jefferson had deduced it from an analysis of French actuarial tables...
...Jefferson's "understanding" has since been discarded (as will Shockley's...
...mandatory reading for those who have followed the procession of books on Watergate...
...Jefferson's famous comment on Shay's insurrection—"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion"—strikes most modern admirersas a fine burst of anarchist sentiment...
...BOOK REVIEW Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence Garry Wills / Doubleday / $10.00 Richard Brookhiser Garry Wills has probably always been most comfortable in the past...
...Campus tension built until the two opponents met in April, when a chanting, heckling mob shouted them down...
...the best defense of human dignity (for any race—Shockley has also frowned on the genes of white Appalachians) is not scientific, but moral—precisely what Rusher would have said, if Wills' kids had let him...
...Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others...
...and 2) that Shockleyism is best refuted by conservatives...
...These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren...
...From this, it is but a step to Jefferson: "He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science....Man was destined for society...
...The Christian Science Monitor ADVERTISEMENT AlWkItTISEMENT NIXON MEMOIRS NOWA NATIONWIDE BESTSELLER Most Controversial Book of Our Time Wins Wide Acceptance of Readers and Reviewers...
...My check or money order for is enclosed (please add $1.25 for postage and handling...
...This is a down-the-line smear, the kind of thing angry writers reserve for monsters, and sober writers reserve for their wastebaskets...
...BOOK REVIEW Grassroots: The Autobiography of George McGovern Random House / $12.50 Promises to Keep: Carter's First Hundred Days Robert Shogan / Thomas Y. Crowell / $8.95 James A. Nuechterlein The poverty of political labels becomes clear as one reflects on the subjects of these two books...
...The Americans severed all ties to England by emigrating, but restored them out of brotherly feeling—"adopted one common king, thereby laying a foundation for perpetual league & amity...
...Those universities in Germany that tolerated anti-Semitic 10-DAY FREE EXAMINATION MONEY BACK GUARANTEE To: Grosset & Dunlap, Inc...
...Such a] neat package of prejudice and free enterprise might constitute an offer much of the Right-wing constituency could not refuse...
...But, Wills points out, in each case "mulatto" is a technical term for the classification of soil colors—one of a set of eight which Jefferson used on all his travels—and if it appears more frequently in the Holland journal than in, say, the French, that is because the soils of the two countries are different...
...Critics Acknowledge Its Historical Importance Richard Nixon: He writes in a voice that -continues to hypnotizeperformance...
...I also heard an account of Wills' first meeting with William F. Buckley, Jr...
...They consist simply of an earnest moralism, a ceaseless ethical quest that ignores indi32 The American Spectator August/September 1978...
...I mention it here only because Inventing America recalls to mind a particularly choice instance, and one in which I happen to have been marginally involved...
...Whatever one thinks of Wills' purpose, one must admire his performance of the task...
...Does that mean he was entertaining incestuous anticipations of the arrival of his red-haired daughter...
...and so America was obliged to go its separate way...
...but] what if Shockley proposes a system of bonuses and voluntary incentives?...No big government at all...
...Wills, 23, was on the threshold of a ten-year association with National Review...
...Those who truly loved America, the candidate suggested, were those who would totally transform her...
...More important, Wills reexamines Jefferson's work, where he finds little Locke, but generous helpings of Scottish Enlightenment...
...If you have not yet read this monumental work, may we urge you to do so now...
...The author of the Declaration, Wills maintains, was a scientific man who framed his document with a scientist's precision...
...Then came the Yale contretemps...
...Though Wills' journalism is as shoddy as Belloc's, we can be all the more thankful for history as marvelous and exciting as Inventing America...
...In documenting Jefferson's scientism, Wills exposes a number of foibles which latter-day Jeffersonians have preferred to hush up...
...The Scots supplemented self-interest with a "moral sense"—a disinterested pleasure in observing and performing benevolent actions...
...The more respectable Right Wingers," he explained, assure us they do not agree with Dr...
...The Declaration—originally a propaganda piece whose drafting the powerhouses of the Second Continental Congress ceded to a young Virginia stand-in for Peyton Randolph, while they pursued more urgent matters—has since become a totem, potent and meaningless...
...but no, it claimed to be exposing him to the withering confutations of the Right....Somehow, that offer did not quite grab the Yalies where they live...
...Under cover of free scrutiny, they helped pave the way to a slaughter of Jews by the millions...
...He displayed in 1972 an almost perfect misunderstanding of the American people in whose name he presumed to speak...
...indeed, they have little theological content at all...
...in reason much inferior...
...McGovern fully shares populism's credulous assumption that the natural state of human affairs is one of egalitarian abundance and cooperative brotherhood and that only the machinations of special interests and conspirators make things otherwise...
...New York State residents add appropriate sales tax...
...Grosset & Dunlap, Inc...
...Fawn Brodie, counting eight uses of the word Richard Brookhiser is associate editor of National Review...
...It could be worse—Hillaire Belloc spent an entire career kicking 16th-century Protestants...
...Though an obvious admirer of Mencken, Fecher is probably too good an Americanto have served his subject well...
...The first draft of the Declaration expounded an equally eccentric theory...
...Maybe he should take some stylistic lessons from Jefferson.] Rusher assures us he would have argued that the government has no right to interfere with people's breeding habits...
...And the Los Angeles Times calls it...
...Consider only the epithets, rattling like cans tied to a stray dog's tail: "prejudice...
...Whatever be their degree of talent," Jefferson wrote Bishop Henri Gregoire in 1809, "it is no measure of their rights...
...Nor should we forget that Mencken defended minority views (many of them abhorrent to his person) as well as minorities long before the espousal of civil liberty became a means of self-aggrandizement...
...The McGovernites had little use for labor (the feeling was reciprocated) and nothing but contempt for the political and cultural values of the American majority...
...Since YAF is a Right-wing organization, you might think it was sponsoring Shockley's views...
...Without one, the other was impossible...
...And his notes of his private talks with such Chinese leaders as Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-lai are absolutely spellbinding...
...His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object....The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm...
...Incensed, the liberal members of the Union called for a referendum, and the Shockley invitation was rescinded...
...The past Wills inhabits in this book is the 18th-century world of the Declaration of Independence...
...For all its traditional characteristics, the McGovern campaign's populism was of anesoteric variety...
...The controversy that has always surrounded Mr...
...president...
...From these roots stem populism's characteristically overheated denunciations of the villainous Interests and its perpetual weakness for conspiracy theories...
...It cannot be ignored...
...YAF indeed contended that Shockley, as a social engineer, was most accurately described as a liberal.] If you liked semi-fascism, you'll love the real thing...
...The New York Times Book Review recently reported, -Hardly had 'RN' appeared in the stores than a spate of TV and wire service stories pronounced it dead on arrival.- It then announced RN's appearance on the nonfiction bestseller list...
...and those gods change very little from one generation to the next...
...Yale's usually comatose YAF chapter then invited Shockley to a debate with publisher and columnist William Rusher, in order to establish two facts: 1) that private campus groups have a right to be addressed by whomever they choose...
...I'm a Distributist," Wills replied, "is that conservative...
...But Rusher was not born in 1743, so Wills' patience and empathy do not extend to him...
...A racism of the private sector...
...and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous...
...Published by Grosset & Dunlap, RN: THE MEMOIRS OF RICHARD NIXON is available at all bookstores, or use the coupon to order direct...
...These people imagined themselves as Middle America's political, cultural, and moral betters...
...The author, of course, is Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV...
...Inventing America seeks to recover the Declaration's original meaning, and to disarm the intellectual imperialists who have annexed it...
...Wills explains the emigration theory with the help of his second point—that 30 The American Spectator August/ September 1978 Jefferson was no Lockean...
...Erik Erikson gets equally low marks...
...Yet British tyranny destroyed this amity...
...Following Hobbes, Locke maintained that men draw together into societies out of self-interest, to escape the risks and burdens of the state of nature...
...to clinch the point, Wills quotes the Marquis de Chastellux, visiting the same spot, with the same reactions...
...As Wills shows, he held with the Scots that intellectual and physical qualities were secondary to the "moral sense...
...So it is that McGovern's loathing (his word) for Richard Nixon is so uncontrolled that he on more than one occasion in 1972 compared the policies of the Nixon administration with those of Nazi Germany and that he here accuses Nixon of racism and even manages at one point (p...
...Believing all this, Jefferson could still write that "all men are created equal...
...Wills' condition is well known (he advertises it in a copious journalistic output...
...that will keep readers turning pages.- Admitting a strong anti-Nixon bias, the Philadelphia Inquirer's book editor nonetheless hailed the book as "a vital historical document that illuminates the thinking of a U.S...
...George McGovern and Jimmy Carter both think of themselves as populists and both trace their fundamental political beliefs to the Christian faith...
...In the Declaration, this came out: "We have reminded [our British brethren] of the circumstances of our emigration & settlement here...that in constituting indeed our several forms of government, we had adopted one common king...
...Name (please print, Address City State Zip NOTE: COMPLETE PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER Please allow 4 weeks for delivery AS sCOULDN'T BE KEPT OFF THE BESTSELLER LIST The fate of RN: THE MEMOIRS OF RICHARD NIXON has been closely followed since announcement of its publication...
...Wills wrote two syndicated columns on the subject...
...Box 857, Madison Square Post Office New York, N.Y...
...Hume (in 1740) put it more strongly: "The approbation of moral qualities most certainly is not derived from reason, or any comparison of ideas...
...and since blacks (and Indians) possessed the moral sense to the same degree as whites, they were equally entitled to freedom...
...The New York Times hails...
...Reading Mencken certainly won't make you a better American—indeed, it may well make you a much worse one—but it will make you a better human since his values are honesty, decency, and, above all else, courage to oppose what Francis Bacon called the gods of the marketplace...
...never saw even an elementary trace of painting or sculpture....They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor...
...the state (or anyone else, for that matter) had no right to arrogate control over human lives...
...but in France he used it thirty-eight times in nine weeks...
...The liberals...
...When the debate was announced, people dissolved into laughter at the billing of racist Shockley as the liberal, to be debated by the conservative Rusher...
...Wills has harder work attacking some older notions: that Jefferson was either an idealist (vague/visionary—pick one), or a disciple of Locke...
...Here is the key to McGovern's thought: the Social Gospel...
...On the Holland tour, he used the word red only seven times in seven weeks...
...In the fall of 1973, the Yale Political Union invited William Shockley, inventorof the transistor and bizarro geneticist, to expound his views (other guests over the last five years have included members of the Spanish Communist Party and the PLO...
...racism...
...P.O...
...Moral goodness," wrote Francis Hutcheson in 1725, "procures approbation and love toward the actor from those who receive no advantage by the action...
...McGovern began and ended his campaign by beckoning a deluded and erring nation to a "higher standard...
...The Atlanta Journal-Constitution terms it "the most absorbing political memoir in our recent history...
...a revealing book...
...10010 Please send me copies of RN: THE MEMOIRS OF RICHARD NIXON 5. $19.95 per copy...
...McGovern wanted not so much to rule the country as to save its soul...
...In the words of noted political scientist James MacGregor Burns, RN "will be disputed...
...Jefferson added a further refinement: that the colonies had put themselves under British rule in the first place...
...234) to suggest clearly, without explicitly saying so, that Nixon was involved in the assassination attempt on George Wallace...
...Indeed, so thorough is his acquaintance with the eighteenth century, one hopes he will soon visit the twentieth...
...The Fort Worth Star-Telegram observed that -once again, enthusiastic reports of Nixon's demise—this time literary—may be premature" and went on to call RN "an intimate . . valuable record...
...The university is not perfectly "value free" as some liberal theorists claim...
...a fascinating "[Mr...
...Shockley...
...His religious views, as outlined in Grassroots, have no transcendent element...
...The Revolution, in Jefferson's view, was a consequence of abused sentiments, not broken contracts...
...Locke's greatest hit in the eighteenth century was not the Two Treatises anyway, but the Essay concerning Humane Understanding (Wills digs up library figures to prove it...
...For Wills has been suffering from a case of ideological chorea for ten years now, the symptoms of which include praising Lillian Hellman, excoriating smokers, and scoffing at any thought of a Soviet threat (except to the blue whale...
...If anything, Jefferson's rounding of nineteen to twenty was uncharacteristically loose...
...it was rather that segment of the upper middle class that considered itself, with becoming modesty, a constituency of conscience...
...SUPPORT MOUNTS In recent weeks RN has won critical praise—albeit sometimes grudgingly—from the media...
...of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies....Settlement having been thus effected in the wilds of America, the emigrants thought proper to adopt that system of laws, under which they had hitherto lived...
...Liberals, Wills argues, construe the preamble—"the pursuit of happiness"—as mandate for big government...
...Shockley's "results," Rusher argued, were irrelevant...
...Wills' examinations of 18th-century thought and feeling have been painstaking, even painful (he has studied the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze), and he catches less meticulous scholars in embarrassing postures...
...At any point in time, Jefferson decided, half the people over age twenty-one (the age of legal majority) could expect to be dead "in 18...
...His account of the frustration he and Henry Kissinger suffered over North Vietnamese duplicity and intransigence is sobering...
...Box 857, Madison Square Post Office New York, N.Y...
...Shockley—they just (shades of Voltaire) agree with his right to express his own views...
...If I am not satisfied I will return my purchase within 10 days for a full refund...
...Rusher...
...Nonetheless, the different meanings they extract from common categories can be instructive, not as exercises in definition, but as indicators of the tortuous paths of liberalism in recent years...
...but proceeds entirely from a moral taste...
...Ignore for the moment (it is not difficult) the argument...
...There is a certain vestigial civility in Wills' attitude—don't kick a man when he's dead...
Vol. 11 • August 1978 • No. 9
