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...
...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reports indicate that, despite occasional rancorous attacks, RN has won nationwide acceptance as both a major historical document and as a highly personal memoir...
...There is a certain vestigial civility in Wills' attitude—don't kick a man when he's dead...
...The New York Times hails...
...The author, of course, is Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV...
...Ignore for the moment (it is not difficult) the argument...
...I also heard an account of Wills' first meeting with William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Wills wrote two syndicated columns on the subject...
...Wills' condition is well known (he advertises it in a copious journalistic output...
...SUPPORT MOUNTS In recent weeks RN has won critical praise—albeit sometimes grudgingly—from the media...
...If I am not satisfied I will return my purchase within 10 days for a full refund...
...and 2) that Shockleyism is best refuted by conservatives...
...Jefferson added a further refinement: that the colonies had put themselves under British rule in the first place...
...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...
...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...
...Nixon's] record of his negotiations with the Soviets is fascinating...
...years at the nearest integral number....Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years...
...Whatever be their degree of talent," Jefferson wrote Bishop Henri Gregoire in 1809, "it is no measure of their rights...
...It could be worse—Hillaire Belloc spent an entire career kicking 16th-century Protestants...
...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...
...Critics Acknowledge Its Historical Importance Richard Nixon: He writes in a voice that -continues to hypnotizeperformance...
...Yet British tyranny destroyed this amity...
...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...
...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...
...McGovern began and ended his campaign by beckoning a deluded and erring nation to a "higher standard...
...The controversy that has always surrounded Mr...
...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...
...years 8. months, or say 19...
...but] what if Shockley proposes a system of bonuses and voluntary incentives?...No big government at all...
...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...
...Hume (in 1740) put it more strongly: "The approbation of moral qualities most certainly is not derived from reason, or any comparison of ideas...
...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...
...a fascinating "[Mr...
...The number twenty, however, was not lightly chosen...
...Consider only the epithets, rattling like cans tied to a stray dog's tail: "prejudice...
...A racism of the private sector...
...the state (or anyone else, for that matter) had no right to arrogate control over human lives...
...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...
...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...
...I'm a Distributist," Wills replied, "is that conservative...
...Buckley considered—"Hugh Kenner tells me it's not" —but hired him anyway...
...and since blacks (and Indians) possessed the moral sense to the same degree as whites, they were equally entitled to freedom...
...If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right...
...10010 Please send me copies of RN: THE MEMOIRS OF RICHARD NIXON 5. $19.95 per copy...
...In documenting Jefferson's scientism, Wills exposes a number of foibles which latter-day Jeffersonians have preferred to hush up...
...If anything, Jefferson's rounding of nineteen to twenty was uncharacteristically loose...
...At some point in their talk, Buckley asked Wills whether he was a conservative...
...The importance of the emigration theory to the original draft of the Declaration now becomes clearer...
...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...
...Published by Grosset & Dunlap, RN: THE MEMOIRS OF RICHARD NIXON is available at all bookstores, or use the coupon to order direct...
...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...
...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 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...
...Indeed, so thorough is his acquaintance with the eighteenth century, one hopes he will soon visit the twentieth...
...His religious views, as outlined in Grassroots, have no transcendent element...
...The university is not perfectly "value free" as some liberal theorists claim...
...And his notes of his private talks with such Chinese leaders as Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-lai are absolutely spellbinding...
...The Atlanta Journal-Constitution terms it "the most absorbing political memoir in our recent history...
...and Jefferson did not own a copy of the Treatises after 1815, perhaps even after 1770...
...The Christian Science Monitor ADVERTISEMENT AlWkItTISEMENT NIXON MEMOIRS NOWA NATIONWIDE BESTSELLER Most Controversial Book of Our Time Wins Wide Acceptance of Readers and Reviewers...
...a revealing 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...
...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...
...New York State residents add appropriate sales tax...
...He displayed in 1972 an almost perfect misunderstanding of the American people in whose name he presumed to speak...
...The more respectable Right Wingers," he explained, assure us they do not agree with Dr...
...Wills has harder work attacking some older notions: that Jefferson was either an idealist (vague/visionary—pick one), or a disciple of Locke...
...These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren...
...These people imagined themselves as Middle America's political, cultural, and moral betters...
...Believing all this, Jefferson could still write that "all men are created equal...
...If you have not yet read this monumental work, may we urge you to do so now...
...Here is the key to McGovern's thought: the Social Gospel...
...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...
...Does that mean he was entertaining incestuous anticipations of the arrival of his red-haired daughter...
...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...
...From these roots stem populism's characteristically overheated denunciations of the villainous Interests and its perpetual weakness for conspiracy theories...
...And no one saw more clearly than he that the vast majority of his fellows had little if any interest in either idea...
...Without one, the other was impossible...
...classic populist challenge—"all right we are two nations"—remains an evocative literary image but a totally misleading picture of American politics...
...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...
...George McGovern, as with all genuine populists, isn't very good at reality...
...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...
...Liberals, Wills argues, construe the preamble—"the pursuit of happiness"—as mandate for big government...
...Those universities in Germany that tolerated anti-Semitic 10-DAY FREE EXAMINATION MONEY BACK GUARANTEE To: Grosset & Dunlap, Inc...
...while his chief intellectual creditor was not Locke, but the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Smith, and Francis Hutcheson...
...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...
...Jefferson had deduced it from an analysis of French actuarial tables...
...Then came the Yale contretemps...
...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...
...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...
...Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others...
...Jefferson's "understanding" has since been discarded (as will Shockley's...
...Grosset & Dunlap, Inc...
...The dynamic force behind McGovern was not America's plain folk, however defined...
...John Dos Passos' James A. Nuechterlein is associate professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario...
...My check or money order for is enclosed (please add $1.25 for postage and handling...
...And the Los Angeles Times calls it...
...For all its traditional characteristics, the McGovern campaign's populism was of anesoteric variety...
...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...
...Incensed, the liberal members of the Union called for a referendum, and the Shockley invitation was rescinded...
...He almost became a Methodist minister and did spend one summer as a student pastor...
...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...
...Those who truly loved America, the candidate suggested, were those who would totally transform her...
...Moral goodness," wrote Francis Hutcheson in 1725, "procures approbation and love toward the actor from those who receive no advantage by the action...
...in reason much inferior...
...George McGovern and Jimmy Carter both think of themselves as populists and both trace their fundamental political beliefs to the Christian faith...
...Rusher...
...mandatory reading for those who have followed the procession of books on Watergate...
...indeed, they have little theological content at all...
...president...
...They consist simply of an earnest moralism, a ceaseless ethical quest that ignores indi32 The American Spectator August/September 1978...
...Such a] neat package of prejudice and free enterprise might constitute an offer much of the Right-wing constituency could not refuse...
...Wills explores a dozen other matters with like precision—how the Fourth became a holiday, though nothing was signed on it...
...Demagoguery issues naturally from populism's simplistic world view...
...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...
...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...
...to clinch the point, Wills quotes the Marquis de Chastellux, visiting the same spot, with the same reactions...
...The Revolution, in Jefferson's view, was a consequence of abused sentiments, not broken contracts...
...P.O...
...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...
...Campus tension built until the two opponents met in April, when a chanting, heckling mob shouted them down...
...Indeed, Americans were not "colonists" at all, but "emigrants...
...Our ancestors," he declared in 1774, "before their emigration to America...possessed a right, which nature has given to all men...
...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...
...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...
...Since YAF is a Right-wing organization, you might think it was sponsoring Shockley's views...
...Shockley...
...McGovern wanted not so much to rule the country as to save its soul...
...Box 857, Madison Square Post Office New York, N.Y...
...it was rather that segment of the upper middle class that considered itself, with becoming modesty, a constituency of conscience...
...why Jefferson opposed both slavery and individual manumission...
...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...
...The liberals...
...But Rusher was not born in 1743, so Wills' patience and empathy do not extend to him...
...Erik Erikson gets equally low marks...
...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...
...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...
...More important, Wills reexamines Jefferson's work, where he finds little Locke, but generous helpings of Scottish Enlightenment...
...As Wills shows, he held with the Scots that intellectual and physical qualities were secondary to the "moral sense...
...Shockley's "results," Rusher argued, were irrelevant...
...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...
...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...
...Wills, 23, was on the threshold of a ten-year association with National Review...
...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 author of the Declaration, Wills maintains, was a scientific man who framed his document with a scientist's precision...
...racism...
...and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous...
...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...
...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...
...They must pardon us if we doubt their total indifference to what Shockley is saying...
...On the Holland tour, he used the word red only seven times in seven weeks...
...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...
...His account of the frustration he and Henry Kissinger suffered over North Vietnamese duplicity and intransigence is sobering...
...Fawn Brodie, counting eight uses of the word Richard Brookhiser is associate editor of National Review...
...Yet they have, as politicians, very little in common...
...but proceeds entirely from a moral taste...
...Whatever one thinks of Wills' purpose, one must admire his performance of the task...
...Wills' prose gets a little woozy here—who is he calling semi-fascist...
...Wills explains the emigration theory with the help of his second point—that 30 The American Spectator August/ September 1978 Jefferson was no Lockean...
...Shockley—they just (shades of Voltaire) agree with his right to express his own views...
...and so America was obliged to go its separate way...
...Box 857, Madison Square Post Office New York, N.Y...
...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...
...It cannot be ignored...
...234) to suggest clearly, without explicitly saying so, that Nixon was involved in the assassination attempt on George Wallace...
...Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration...
...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...
...Nixon's] voice continues to hypnotize...
...In the words of noted political scientist James MacGregor Burns, RN "will be disputed...
...Inventing America seeks to recover the Declaration's original meaning, and to disarm the intellectual imperialists who have annexed it...
...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...
...but in France he used it thirty-eight times in nine weeks...
...Wills perhaps has most fun with careless psychohistorians...
...The Scots supplemented self-interest with a "moral sense"—a disinterested pleasure in observing and performing benevolent actions...
...The past Wills inhabits in this book is the 18th-century world of the Declaration of Independence...
...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...
...The first draft of the Declaration expounded an equally eccentric theory...
...Under cover of free scrutiny, they helped pave the way to a slaughter of Jews by the millions...
...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...
...Nixon instantly attached itself to his book...
...Though an obvious admirer of Mencken, Fecher is probably too good an Americanto have served his subject well...
...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...
...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...
...semi-fascism...
...This is a down-the-line smear, the kind of thing angry writers reserve for monsters, and sober writers reserve for their wastebaskets...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 11 • August 1978 • No. 9
