Fighting for Liberty and Virtue

...Besides, the eighteenth century in England is also the age of Johnson and Fielding, of clear-sighted moralists like John Brown and James Burgh, of William Pitt and the lofty Edmund Burke...

...They begin the story of a young Sicilian-American from Brooklyn who joined the Communist movement at age 15, but was expelled from the party at age 2o...

...Perhaps sometime soon the professor will turn aside from the history of the American South to produce it...

...The same conditions that sparked the American rebellion helped ensure its success...

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...stained glass windows depicting the Twelve Apostles in obscene postures...

...The adoption of the Constitution by narrow margins at the state conventions was made possible by reluctant Federalist pledges to add the Bill of Rights—and by the prospect of having the widely trusted George Washington as the nation's first President...

...Of the "emerging global marketplace" he writes: "Animality and filth, like everything else, have become commodities, which people are called upon to tolerate as expressions of freedom and feel free to buy as much as they wish...

...By the time of Loudoun's appointment, the practice of dumping the Crown's mediocrities on the colonies was more than half a century old—and continued right through the Revolutionary War...

...But there would not have been an American Revolution without the coalition painstakingly forged by American leaders who understood both camps of the aggrieved...

...Marvin Olasky, an atheist-turnedCalvinist who now teaches journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, has in recent years applied his Ph.D...

...Genovese has lately come to the attention of American conservatives of all tendencies because of his stout-hearted defense of academic freedom, civility, and ordinary decency in American universities...

...let us not look back, lestwe perish and become a monument of infamy and derision to the world...

...Born in rancor and mutual suspicion, the new Republic was sustained in its shaky early years by the distinctly non-political activities of ordinary pioneers and by the character of leaders who, for all their personal foibles and religious differences, understood the link between virtue and liberty...

...Dubbed "monks" or "Franciscans," club members enjoyed their revels in the rebuilt abbey under JOHN R. DUNLAP teaches English at Santa Clara University...

...The American Revolution was preceded not just by clashes of political and economic interests between London and the colonies, but as well by a culture war...

...Less bracing was the "agitated peace" that followed the successful Revolution...

...Evidently he and his wife, the historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, have had quite a time of it at the various places they have taught, at one of which they were even (falsely) accused of forcing graduate students to do their laundry...

...The countless opportunists and careerists who dominate the historical associations call themselves liberals as a matter of political convenience...

...Blurred under the wide brush-strokes of today's general histories is the moral and religious dimension of the conflict, which the secularized twentieth-century imagination has trouble noticing...

...Patrick Henry of Virginia and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts were animated alike by love of God and disdain for bureaucrats...

...Nonetheless, Genovese is a towering figure among American historians and intellectuals— an iconoclast whose full autobiography one hopes one day to read...

...In the unlikely prospect of a fascist or communist ascendancy tomorrow, they may be counted on to apply for party cards as soon as it looks like a smart move...

...Stirred by the Great Awakening of the 1740's, the colonial descendants of pious religious dissenters took a particularly dim view of London's intermittent efforts to establish throughout the colonies the Church of England...

...By his own admission he remained a supporter of the Soviet Union and its international policies "until there was nothing left to support...

...Secretary of State for the American colonies, and thus in charge of the land war, was George Sackville, a promiscuous bisexual whose reputation for cowardice and venality created a seething reservoir of distrust among subordinates...

...Beautiful oversized picture books on the American West, wildlife, art, photography...

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...We have fled the political Sodom," Samuel Adams thundered in Philadelphia a month after signing the Declaration of Independence...

...Constitution "papered over differences among members of the revolutionary coalition...

...First Lord of the Admiralty was John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, a former Medmenham "monk" more agile at dodging charges of bribery than at securing frigates for the naval effort...

...Yet Burke himself complained that the shabby character of key British leaders was a drag on their public performance, and when the "prodigal son" Ben Franklin finally left London for Philadelphia on the eve of the Revolution, after sixteen years of more or less sycophantic residency among the Americans' overlords, he expressed his disappointment with the Crown in moral terms: "When I consider the extream Coruption prevalent among all Orders of Men in this old rotten State . .. I cannot but apprehend more Mischief than Benefit from a closer Union...

...Of course, one can hardly expect less when one writes passages like these: Anything that comes with a cri de coeur for the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden passes muster and may be expected to be greeted with hosannas, no matter how absurd the arguments and blundering the scholarship...

...What an unpleasant read it must have been for all those unctuous, self-congratulatory fools in Dissent's stage army...

...At the doorway of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1765, a young secular-minded law student named Thomas Jefferson was awestruck by Patrick Henry's "torrents of sublime eloquence" delivered against the Stamp Act in an oratory studded with Old Testament imagery...

...They went with the McCarthyite flow in the 195os and go with its leftwing variant today...

...Perhaps the most interesting selection in the book is an essay entitled "The Question...

...Academia normally defines as political that which lies beyond its ideological consensus, which is generally though not always accurately perceived as "liberal...

...Even the smug deist Benjamin Franklin, who despised the Pennsylvanian Presbyterians, muted his hatred for religious enthusiasm as a coalition was cemented between anti-tax freethinkers and morally alarmed Christians...

...That link, Olasky argues, is one we should not lose sight of...

...Praised by his American friend Benjamin Franklin as "a humane, liberal reformer," Sir Francis was in any event a reliable caterer to the libertine tastes of the worthies who flocked from London to join his "Hell-Fire Club," among whom were various cabinet ministers and members of Parliament...

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...Best known for The Tragedy of American Compassion (1992), an acclaimed criIt Seems We've Been Here Before 70 January 199 6 The American Spectator tique of the moral assumptions underlying welfare policy, he has also written a social history of abortion and a sweeping review of press attitudes through American history...

...Olasky does not dispute the standard economic and political causes adduced for the Revolution...

...In Fighting for Liberty and Virtue, Olasky dips into several dozen source documents and specialized histories to present a survey of the eighteenth century that "spotlights the intersection of politics and morality...

...In the wake of bitter debates between Federalists and anti-Federalists, the Great Compromise embodied in the U.S...

...Name Address City / State / Zip HAMILTON Box 15-8, Falls Village, CT 06031 The American Spectator • January 1996 71...

...Throughout this essay Genovese offers Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America by Marvin Olasky Crossway Books 316 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY John R. Dunlap mong the leading English social clubs of the mid-eighteenth century was Medmenham, formerly a Cistercian abbey located in Buckinghamshire on the outskirts of London...

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...Anglican leaders on display "were often distinguished more by the size of their stomachs than the breadth of their learning," and the latitudinarian Anglican hierarchy in London was perceived (by and large accurately) as hand-in-glove with a quasi-pagan regime...

...with the colonial historian Carl Bridenbaugh and others, however, he contends that the various tax decrees and legislative enactments of Parliament, together with their obnoxious enforcement by locally garrisoned British troops and the admiralty courts, did not of themselves constitute sufficient impetus for the colonial uprising...

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...And academia defines as objective and scientific that which expresses its own prejudices and viewpoint...

...Here was Genovese insisting that the moral responsibility for Stalinism falls not just on bona fide members of the Communist Party (like himself) but on liberals, "democratic socialists," "radical democrats," and others—those who "could usually be counted upon to support, 'critically,' of course, the essentials of our political line on world and national affairs...

...It first appeared in the "democratic socialist" journal Dissent, and asks very pointedly, "What did you know [about Soviet Communism], and when did you know it...

...Both saw the connection between moral turpitude and rapacious taxation...

...I hope Genovese will forgive me for saying so, but he is precisely the kind of "aristocratic socialist" Marx and Engels dismissed with the back of their hand as long ago as 1848...

...In 1753, Sir Francis Dashwood —a wellconnected noble destined for such offices as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Postmaster General—acquired the property at Medmenham and rehabbed the ruins of the abbey into a plush cathouse...

...Omitted in such histories is the impression of the colonists that Loudoun was a swaggering peacock, with a retinue of seventeen servants, a mistress in tow, a disposition to whine, a fondness for terrorizing his own troops, and no personal military distinction whatever...

...Not that Dashwood perfectly epitomized the London of that era...

...training to a kind of public service with a string of historical surveys useful to an understanding of American political culture...

...The movement for independence was fueled by the sentiments of two distinct colonial groups: "Enlightenment-influenced politicians who demanded small government, and Awakening-energized Christians who pushed for holy government...

...Over 60 subject areas: Politics, Biography, History Fiction, Science, Cooking, Gardening, more...

...When London appointed the Earl of Loudoun military commander over the colonies in 1756 at the start of the French and Indian War, the colonial assemblies, according to one standard college text, "regarded Loudoun's authority with suspicion...

...some tempting autobiographical apergus, some of them consigned to the footnotes...

...Even among the dissipated English upper classes, Sir Francis was thought by some to have taken his worship of Voltaire a bit far...

...The two key cabinet ministers during the war both owed their appointments more to connection than to talent or sense...

...Unfortunately, the dozen or so answersthat Dissent commissioned are not reproduced here, but after reading Genovese's challenge many readers will go off to the library in search of them...