The Radicalism of the American Revolution
Wood, Gordon S.
art Parnell, violent Fenians, and assassinations of English functionaries. Trollope decided to do another Irish novel (his views on Ireland were growing quite conservative) and dragged a niece...
...when she visits her lover...
...For her, the officer was "part of a system that kidnapped defenseless people, maintained them in inhuman conditions, and killed them...
...This patriarchal order was accepted as part of the great chain of being stretching down from God to king to father of the family...
...or to the French revolution, as a class struggle to be explained by sociological laws of a more or less Marxist kind...
...This assertion of individual autonomy was crucial to the American commitment to democracy, for it saved America from what liberal philosophers had always thought of as T he revolutionaries were fortunate in having leaders of exceptional culture, not merely "gentry," as Wood calls the educated property-owners, but also men of ideas—"philosophers," in the Enlightenment sense...
...He does not explore the problem of loyalty that is posed by the double allegiance inherent in a federal republic: Is the patria to which patriotism is directed the state or the union...
...Wood argues that a far-reaching change was the secret of the United States' enduring success...
...The disappearance of class divisions clearly saved America from the instability of the new European republics, which were undermined by conflict between bourgeois and proletarian interests...
...and argues CHILDREN OF CAIN: VIOLENCE AND THE VIOLENT IN LATIN AMERICA Tina Rosenberg William Morrow & Co./404 pages/$25 reviewed by ARTURO J. CRUZ, JR...
...The American conception was not simply one of equality of rights, or equality of opportunity, or equality in the eyes of God...
...Their virtue, writes Wood, would be of a different kind: Virtue became less the harsh self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity...
...On November 3, he had a stroke at his brother-in-law's...
...In October, he thanked his fan Cardinal Newman for a home remedy for asthma...
...He died on December 6. One can take the measure of N. John Hall's calmly comprehensive biography by looking back at James Pope Hennessy's 1971 attempt...
...She has tuberculosis, raises her two children, and has to suffer her uncle's shouts of "Whore...
...Trollope did not do that, but he did import some of the manly flavor of Henry Fielding and his plein-air eighteenth century...
...Parliament and other medieval institutions that resisted patriarchalism in England meant little to Americans...
...Javier worships the memory of "Comrade Mao" and "Comrade Stalin...
...Pre-revolutionary American society reflected the imperial design of the colonial regime, but although the colonists shared every Englishman's love of political liberty, American domestic and community life before 1775 was more authoritarian than England's: wives and children were Maurice Cranston is the author, most recently, of The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754-1762 (University of Chicago Press...
...To Order Coll: 1-800-326-0263 (8:30-5 PST) EMPRESS/Institute for Contemporary Studies =243 Kearny Street, San Francisco, (A 94108 69 democracy's ruinous defect: the triumph of the majority at the expense of individual rights...
...Asa description of these lives and efforts, the book is a success...
...The age of ideas was not an age of ideologies, and innovation was not feared in a world confident that the future would be better than the past...
...some, in fact, thought it even better expressed by women...
...This belief extended into family life...
...What they wanted was a republic that would respect their private rights and interests, a republic committed to individual life, liberty, and property...
...according to Rosenberg, was the "product of years of methodical indoctrination," while the viciousness of the monteneros "seemed more the spontaneous expression of a wild, formless anger...
...Wood even suggests that Locke's theory of education (directed against patriarchalism in the family) was more important for Americans than his theory of government (directed against patriarchalism in the state...
...The grandson of one of the models for Phineas Finn, Pope Hennessy brought much Irish Trollopeana to light and was praised by Auden...
...Even in Switzerland, social difference produced oligarchies behind the facade of popular sovereignty...
...They achieved perhaps unconsciously what their leaders achieved consciously and deliberately.vate to the public in all things—could not be conjured in the American people...
...Most Americans today would say the latter...
...Gladys is also exploited, by her neighbor...
...Rebellion against the king destroyed the pivotal element of the patriarchy, allowing a new and altogether freer society to take its place...
...That anger, moreover, "was the entirely 'rational outgrowth of years of bronca {rage] in Argentine politics, a grand tradition of intolerance, vindictiveness, and resentment...
...Trollope decided to do another Irish novel (his views on Ireland were growing quite conservative) and dragged a niece thither with him to do some looking around...
...How was it accomplished...
...For Rosenberg, the central problem is "a disregard for law and politics as a way to solve marked social contrasts...
...In fact, the methodical indoctrination of the military and the monteneros' ruthless kidnappings were motivated by the same animus: each wanted to eliminate the foe—the problem...
...Within decades following the Declaradon of Independence, the United States became the most egalitarian nation in the history of the world...
...Gordon S. Wood, professor of history at Brown, offers something commendably original: social history that explains the revolution by marshaling often-overlooked details without reference to sociology...
...Wood has little to say about the constitutional roots of the Civil War, aside from pointing to the asymmetry between the North, where equality was seen as universal, and the South, where it excluded slaves...
...In Children of Cain, Tina Rosenberg travels to Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, El Salvador, and Nicaragua to determine the motives of the violent, comprehensible only as part of their efforts—most often vain—to orient themselves in their nations' politics...
...Seventeenth-century metaphysics, with its picture of a systematically designed universe, reinforced this image of man's subordination to superior powers...
...F or Spanish Americans, political violence has been both the enigmatic object of an ancient query and a brutal reality that haunts each generation...
...And, given that political theorists had always said it was more difficult to maintain a republic than to establish one, how could it be kept in being...
...The military's brutality, Arturo J. Cruz, Jr., a visiting research fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Consuelo Cruz Sequeira write frequently on Latin American politics...
...He was fighting subversion and communism, not trying to get rich...
...Back in London, he fell ill...
...In his comedies of courtship, where bright and passionate women often strain sympathetically against various social codes, Trollope never lets one suppose that the human heart can do without order or structure of some kind...
...Unfortunately for that government, the authors of antiquity had far more to say in favor of republican than imperial systems...
...James C. Miller III, former ISBN 1.55815-134-6 director of the OMB Available now...
...Even a scientist and philosopher as renowned as Benjamin Franklin did not count as a gentleman until he had retired from his trade as a printer and, as Wood points out, "made no attempt to appear to be one" (although one suspects this was part of Franklin's well-known pose of being a plain man among his betters...
...more submissive, servants more servile, parishioners more docile, and tradesmen more deferential...
...13 Histories of the American revolution have hitherto depicted it as similar to either the English revolution of 1688, as much conservative as radical...
...A more hardened montenera disagreed...
...and CONSUELO CRUZ SEQUEIRA 70 The American Spectator April 1992...
...The fusion of democracy and individualism was furthered by the merging of the old social classes into what was, in effect, a single middle class: In America, in the North at least, already it seemed as if the so-called middle class was all there was...
...They succeeded, Wood thinks, by becoming a different sort of people, as distinctively republican as they had previously been distinctively monarchical...
...but on the other hand the public dignity conferred by representative office may well have bred in heads of families and households a tendency to tyrannize in the home...
...He was there to save his country...
...But at least they were not made uncomfortable by a period of exciting uncertainty...
...Trollope's return to popularity after a posthumous eclipse is often dated to the Blitz and attributed to a longing for his cozy, windless, and edenic daydream world, now as exotic as that of The Tale of Genji (to use Pope Hennessy's comparison...
...The aristocracy lost its monopoly of civility and politeness and the working class lost its exclusive claim to labor...
...Nothing contributed more to this explosion of energy than did the idea of equality...
...it was, as Wood puts it, a "basic down-to-earth belief [that] no one was really better than anyone else...
...Let it never be said that we live in a barbarous time...
...repudiates the revisionist deviations of the Albanian Communist party...
...Middling sorts in America appropriated the principal virtues of the two extremes and drained the vitality from both the aristocracy and the working class...
...But compared to Hall's, the 1971 book seems arch, amateurish, and sketchy...
...He didn't rape...
...The cult of Rome was especially strong in English schools in the early days of empire...
...While eighteenth-century thinkers were intensely interested in republican government, they assumed it could be established only in small states, such as the Italian republic of Lucca or the Swiss canton of Zug...
...This was doubtless because rebellion against King George III developed into rebellion against kingship as such, and if Wood is correct, the Americans' conception of domestic society was too closely allied to their conception of political society for the one to change radically without a corresponding change in the other...
...Virtue became identified with decency...
...If Gladys is so beaten down that she has come to believe that the patron is always right, then her perfect opposite is the young urban guerrillero Javier, who is far from despair but almost irretrievably lost to madness...
...Although the plebeians did not invent the republic, it was they, transformed into citizens, who kept it in*being...
...Where the ancient classical virtue was martial and masculine...
...A naval officer who participated in Argentina's guerra sucia, or "dirty war," is particularly well-evoked: Enamored of personal authority, he was habitually benevolent towards prisoners...
...Where Pope Hennessy often obtrudes his epigrammatic cleverness, Hall is ever the deferential, efficient servant of Trollope, who would doubtless have warmed to his latest chronicler's modesty, industry, and common sense...
...In Peru, where far too many people must choose between despair and ideological dementia, Gladys Meneses, at the age of 23, is despondent...
...One montenera described him as "a kind of worthy enemy...
...Artists and shopkeepers had patrons, not customers, and patronage characterized the relations between rich and poor...
...Orientation is everywhere the urgent objective for the children of Cain...
...The Founding Fathers feasted on Cicero, and relayed his wisdom as the guiding principles for transforming subjects into citizens...
...The new republicanism was built not on love, respect, and consent, as the Founding Fathers had hoped, but on social competitiveness and individualism: The revolution resembled the breaking of a dam, releasing thousands upon thousands of pent-up pressures...
...It is ironic that European kings and bishops had their elites educated in the classics, i.e., in literature that exalted ancient Greece and Rome, which were neither monarchist nor Christian...
...The world was astonished when the Americans set up a republic with a population of millions and a territory larger than any European kingdom...
...Besides, American religion centered more on commandments and interdictions than on rituals of worship...
...If it were only so, one could hope that education could transform souls for the better...
...Locke called for recognition of the child as an independent being to be taught to rule itself, not as a junior member of the group to be trained to obey...
...Her awareness of this problem makes her descriptions of Argentine life rich and believable, and her facile conclusions perplexing...
...Wood sees the revolution, as did European observers at the time, as marking a deep rupture with the past...
...The Americans of the eighteenth century were fortunate in several respects, not least in being able to live through what Wood calls "radical" changes and come out with their optimism undiminished...
...His vision of the world was terribly Neanderthal, but he was convinced of what he was doing...
...He wasn't corrupt...
...But if the newly liberated Americans made themselves good republicans, it was not on the Cicer oni an model, for the republican virtue that all authorities from Cato to Montesquieu had insisted on as essential—entailing the sacrifice of the priThe American Spectator April 1992 "Stop me before I spend again...
...the new virtue was feminized and capable of being expressed by women as well as men...
...Hardcover $24.95, 225 pp...
...It could be argued against Wood that those institutions that most historians have seen as the breeding grounds of American democracy—the colonial legislatures and town meetings—were as subversive of patriarchalism as the institutions that preserved the medieval THE RADICALISM OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Gordon S. Wood Alfred A. Knopf/446 pages/$27.50 reviewed by MAURICE CRANSTON 68 The American Spectator April 1992 liberties and franchises of Englishmen...
...Though he weighs his pages with plot summaries of the novels, Pope Hennessy pretty clearly has not cracked the travel books or the Cicero biography...
...A brilliant, incisive analysis of congressional spending habits...
...He was not to finish The Landleaguers...
...This reduction of the great writer to an artificer of nostalgia is unnecessary...
...The financial innovations that had made England a commercial society by 1750 were slow to take hold in the New World...
...In the great tradition of nineteenth-century novels about women and marriage and money, he comes just behind the giants—Austen and Eliot and James—who rethought the very premises of the genre...
...Their houses are contiguous—the miserable and the less miserable on either side of the same wall...
...Oxford is currently reprinting, in its paperback World's Classics series, nearly forty Trollope titles, many long unavailable...
...As a member of Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path, Javier dreams of tennis shoes available only on the other side of the desert, in Pinochet's Chile, and considers the massacre in Tiananmen Square a "very hopeful and uplifting event...
...abhorring disloyalty, he felt revulsion when any of his foes among the montenero guerrilla movement became a collaborator...
...And the divisions in the American republic that were more or less identical to those in Switzerland led, as in Switzerland, to civil war—namely, the political divisions inherent in any federal constitution that fails to achieve equilibrium between central authority and local autonomy...
...The Americans Wood describes in this excellent book were not so sure...
...The great planters were protectors, creditors, and counselors—"friends"—to the lesser farmers...
...It was they, of course, who promoted republicanism, an idea they derived not from the experience of Lucca or Zug but from books, and chiefly from books about ancient Rome...
...Protestant studies of the Old Testament yielded numerous suggestions that a patriarchal order was inspired by God...
...American society was also more stratified into patricians and plebeians...
...Anonymous member of Congress The Culture of Spending offers a revolutionary view of why congressional spending is out of control—and how we can develop spending reforms that work...
Vol. 25 • April 1992 • No. 4
