A Necessary Evil
McGreevy, John
DON'T TREAD ON HE A Necessary Evil A History of American Distrust of Government Garry Wills Simon and Schuster, $24.50, 343 pp. John McGreevy Does Garry Wills write faster than I read? The...
...Wills upends several antigovernmental shibboleths...
...We ponder term limits for public officials as a mechanism for returning government to "the people...
...The logic of A Necessary Evil presupposes an antigovernment sentiment stretching from Patrick Henry to Idaho survival-ists...
...The basic argument is unexceptionable: that Americans piled a suspicion of the Constitution, a frontier tradition, and a cult of the gun onto "the general anti-authoritarian instincts of mankind...
...But Wills remains the real, sometimes the only, thing...
...The arrival of Wills's latest book, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, prompts this disturbing thought...
...The book originated as Wills observed the Republican success during the 1994 congressional elections and the subsequent antigovernmental rhetoric that accompanied the standoff between the House of Representatives and President Clinton...
...As I write this review Wills's biography of Saint Augustine, published to critical acclaim six months ago, lies half read on my night-stand...
...Perhaps the broader problem is a contemporary suspicion of institutions, not just long-standing antagonism toward government...
...We contrast the supposed effectiveness of guerrilla warfare in revolutionary South Carolina and Vietnam with lumbering armies...
...In the last two years Wills has published substantial essays on, among other topics, Italian silent film, Greek sculpture, Jesse Ventura, the Sundance film festival, President Bill Clinton, and the Iliad...
...Or a deadly reiteration, recycled in various media, of one long-held, slightly suspect idea...
...As Wills puts it, "Then there was one gun for every ten people in the colonies...
...And not even Wills, I'm guessing, bothers to count the reviews, newspaper columns, and articles...
...The September issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains an incisive essay on Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address that develops topics first elaborated in Wills's Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg...
...Most families did not even own a gun...
...A Necessary Evil rests firmly in this canon, although not at the top rank...
...A generation after John Kennedy's call to government service, talented college graduates choosing federal employment over a career in, say, investment banking have become scarce...
...And too, Wills noted the ways in which figures as disparate as David Ko-resh and Oliver Stone warned of an overreaching state...
...the three branches of government exist not to check federal power but to make its exercise more efficient...
...The academic supporters of this broad antigovernmental impulse come in for careful scrutiny...
...Our history, and false readings of that history, make Americans susceptible to a naive faith in the local group...
...At his best he delves into the literature on his chosen subject, avoiding the disdain for scholarly argument that among some commentators masks an unwillingness to complicate convenient assertions...
...In the last forty years I count twenty-one books...
...The term "public intellectual" is a weary one, and too often it means the print equivalent of Larry King...
...And Wills demolishes arguments against the constitutionality of standing armies or even the army's ability to choose its own soldiers...
...Where Wills is less persuasive, for all his historical acumen, is in his analysis of the origin of our current dilemma...
...And Jack Kemp (who termed the bombing of Kosovo an "international Waco") and other conservatives now attack Clinton with the same bloodlust that student activists once reserved for Richard Nixon...
...National Rifle Association publicists like to compare their efforts to those of the Lexington minutemen, but colonial militias, in fact, did little to aid the revolutionary war effort...
...Violent resistance to the government began on the left side of the political spectrum, but the same admiration for guerrilla tactics and the local group marks both the Weatherman and the Michigan Militia...
...The founders did not believe in state sovereignty...
...He is especially concerned that a broad interpretation of the right to bear arms not receive further sanction...
...Wills describes government as a "necessary good" and complains that "when marriages fail, we do not think it is because marriage is an evil in itself...
...But the vitriol directed at the federal government by federal employees like Congressman Tom DeLay (R-Tex...
...The list Wills compiles of antigovernmental attitudes— a preference for the "authentic," the "spontaneous," the "candid," and the "participatory"—could double as a dictionary for sixties-era reformers cynical about political parties, trade unions, and the nuclear family...
...He then emerges with a provocative interpretation of (take your pick) religion and American politics, the Declaration of Independence, American Catholicism, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, that challenges specialists even as the clarity of his prose attracts the elusive general reader...
...Secessionists received a "definitive refutation" of their constitutional claims from Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Webster, and Andrew Jackson...
...Conservatives typically supported the American effort in Vietnam, but attacked government with the same vehemence a decade later...
...But its achievement may depend upon social changes more far-reaching than a proper interpretation of the Second Amendment...
...One historian calls them "more noisy than useful...
...and the violence orchestrated by a Timothy McVeigh, are genuinely new in the context of twentieth-century American life...
...I only skimmed the book on John Wayne...
...Imagine Sam Rayburn treating the House of Representatives with the same contempt evidenced by recent waves of congressional reformers, many so suspicious of "the Beltway" that they cannot bear to spend weekends in the corrupting capital...
...Instead, this mistrust stems from the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when governmental authority came under unprecedented attack...
...Now there are more than one for every man, woman, and child in America....Yet this latter situation is justified by appeal to the former...
...John McGreevy, the author of Parish Boundaries (Chicago), teaches history at the University of Notre Dame...
...GovernCommonweal I 4 October 22,1999 mental officials had, after all, spied on their own citizens, and conducted an immoral and often illegal war...
...Attendance at political rallies, membership in political parties, and voting rates have declined...
...But marriage, too, is a more fragile institution in 1999 than 1969, by causes good and bad...
...It is, after all, startling to find prominent legal scholars discovering a right to armed resistance of the government, a right emanating from a putatively antigovernment climate in 1787...
...Wills's goal in A Necessary Evil is admirable— to stop Americans from loving their country by hating their government...
...Ronald Reagan's view of government was the bloated nanny state, protector of prying bureaucrats and welfare cheats...
Vol. 126 • October 1999 • No. 18
