American Creation

Dad gave me the book American Creation for Christmas, and I finished reading it last week.

Joseph Ellis writes about the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the time when the colonies declared their independence, successfully overcame (or perhaps more accurately, outlasted) the British military, adopted the Constitution, and laid the foundation for an enduring democracy and an "expanding mandate for individual rights that eventually ended slavery, made women's suffrage inevitable, and sanctioned the civil rights of all minorities."

It was the following words in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence which ensured that what was to happen in North America was not simply a war for independence but a true American Revolution:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are insituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

One of the key strengths of the Constitution, according to Ellis, is how it for the first time provided for multiple sources of sovereignty vested in the government. Unlike a monarchy where authority is unitary and resides soley in the sovereign, the Constitution was ambiguous about the balance of power, creating an ongoing tension between the States and the federal government as well as between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the former. It is this very assimilation of conflict--this decision to make political disagreements a strength and not a limitation of government--that has given the U.S. the flexibility it has needed to grow from a small provincial state to the most powerful nation on earth, all the while becoming an increasingly heterogeneous society.

Ellis illuminates the personalities of the founders, discussing not only their well-known though sometimes mythic greatness but also their flaws and inconsistencies.

Most interestingly, American Creation also explores at length the failures of the founding generation. In particular, the founders were unable to address slavery or the future of the Native Americans in a way consistent with the principles at the heart of the American Revolution. While it is tempting to suggest that we can see this only now in hindsight, Ellis documents that the inability to solve these problems was well understood by the founders, even to the point that they worried about their own reputations with future generations being stained by these failures.

It was also fascinating to see how the early years of American politics were so powerfully influenced by the personalities and standing of the revolutionaries like Washington and Jefferson. Yet they themselves became painfully aware of how events were often shaped by forces beyond their control. Case in point: the relentless demographic push of American settlers westward, a development that limited the federal government's ability to establish more equitable accomodations for the Native Americans.

Reading that, I was reminded of something Barack Obama said on Meet the Press back on October 22, 2006:

Most of the time, it seems, that the president has maybe 10 percent of his agenda set by himself and 90 percent of it set by circumstances. So, you know, an Abraham Lincoln is defined by slavery and the war, FDR defined by the Depression and, and World War II. So I'm not sure that I can categorize what is, is — are those ingredients in each and every circumstance.

But I think, when I think about great presidents, I think about those who transform how we think about ourselves as a country in fundamental ways so that, that, at the end of their tenure, we have looked and said to ours — that's who we are. And, and our, our — and for me at least, that means that we have a more expansive view of our democracy, that we've included more people into the bounty of this country. And, you know, there are circumstances in which, I would argue, Ronald Reagan was a very successful president, even though I did not agree with him on many issues, partly because at the end of his presidency, people, I think, said, "You know what? We can regain our greatness. Individual responsibility and personal responsibility are important." And they transformed the culture and not simply promoted one or two particular issues.