American dialogue The Founders and us

Review by Choice Review

In American Dialogue, Ellis makes an argument for the continued relevance of historical education. The author writes in the preface ("My Self-Evident Truth") that he organized the book around the notion that the American Revolution "produced the Big Bang that created all the planets and orbits in our political universe." Ellis contends that one can identify the origins of contemporary political crises in the moral attitudes and political structures established by the founding generation. The book is structured as a series of discussions between the past and the present: contemporary racism is examined in relation to Jefferson's white supremacy; economic inequality is placed in the context of John Adams's reflections on freedom and property; the gridlock of political institutions is juxtaposed to the attitude of pragmatic compromise that allowed Madison to shepherd the Constitution through ratification; and Washington's foreign policy realism is used to illuminate the ambivalence of American globalism in the post--Cold War world order. Ellis's approach is reductive in that he ignores intervening historical development in an effort to show the continued relevance of the Revolution. Nevertheless, the book is charmingly written and would be a perfect catalyst for discussion in an introductory course on American history. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates; general readers. --Samuel Paul Harshner, Marquette University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

if the historian Joseph J. Ellis has a project - an unfairly pedestrian term to describe his rich body of work - it is to restore to the nation's founders some measure of their humanity. In books like "Founding Brothers," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and "American Sphinx," a brilliantly drawn portrait of Jefferson, Ellis renders the founders in fine shadings: wise and bold and prescient, yes, but also, at times, blinkered and uncertain, men in conflict with one another and even themselves. Ellis is not a revisionist; he is not pulling down statues from their pedestals. He does not begrudge the founders their disagreements or the fact that more than two centuries later, so many of their arguments remain unresolved. As he writes in his newest book, "American Dialogue," the founding generation's "greatest legacy is the recognition that argument itself is the answer." Like his previous histories, "American Dialogue" follows particular founders into (and not always out of) hard-fought and consequential disputes. But in one key respect this book is a departure: Ellis's subject is not only the founding era, but also our own, and the "ongoing conversation between past and present." In chapters labeled "then," Ellis considers Jefferson's contemptible views on race, Adams's premonitions about the rise of an American aristocracy and the emergence of a grossly unequal society, Madison's belief in the Constitution as a "living document" and Washington's brand of foreign policy realism. In chapters labeled "now," he listens for echoes of these ideas in 21st-century America. This, it turns out, is a dispiriting exercise: Mostly what Ellis hears is noise. Our civic dialogue has broken down, Ellis observes, and our "divided America," contentious in all the wrong ways, is "currently incapable of sustained argument" on any subject - the kind of argument that goes somewhere other than round and round, the kind that yields understanding and possibly, over time, solutions. One of the liveliest debates in American history, which Ellis has described before, took place in the letters Adams and Jefferson exchanged during their final 14 years of life, between 1812 and 1826 (the two men died, as legend and fact both have it, on the same day, July 4, 50 years after declaring America's independence). Ellis returns to their correspondence in "American Dialogue," focusing on Jefferson's romantic notion that economic and social equality would be the natural order of American life and Adams's retort that "as long as property exists, it will accumulate in individuals and families.... The snow ball will grow as it rolls." Jefferson's was the prevailing view at the time. Meanwhile Adams's "prophecy," as Ellis notes, struck most of his peers as "so bizarre and thoroughly un-American ... that it served as evidence for the charge that he had obviously lost his mind." Adams saw no way to prevent the consolidation of wealth and power by American oligarchs, but he did believe it could and must be moderated - regulated - by a strong national government. There can be no question whose forecast was right. Jefferson's ideal of an egalitarian, agrarian society was an anachronism before the 19th century was out, while the Gilded Age, near that century's end, provided garish confirmation of Adams's insight. So, of course, does the current age. Türning his attention to the present, Ellis paints a vivid if familiar picture of the redistribution of wealth to the top of the income scale, as well as the abandonment - indeed the denigration - of Adams's belief that, in Ellis's words, "the free market required regulation for capitalism to coexist with the egalitarian expectations of democracy." And here, the dispassionate historian calmly takes the gloves off. Since the 1980s, Ellis argues, the political right has engaged in a persistent, well-funded and "radically revisionist" act of historical fraud, painting government as "demonic" in the eyes of its creators. Faced by the reality that Adams anticipated - deep, endemic, expanding inequality - conservatives peddle Jeffersonian remedies, like the crippling of federal power. Ellis thinks the right has been so successful in selling this "extreme version of capitalist theology" that it has, to a meaningful degree, shut down the centuries-old debate about the role of government. The advocates of regulation and economic reform have been shouted down and shoved to the sidelines, Ellis contends, turning "mainstream politics" into "a one-sided conversation, a muted version of the American Dialogue." Ellis sees the same dynamic at work in another vast area: the law. The book traces Madison's "evolutionary odyssey from 1786 to 1789," an extraordinary period in which Madison stage-managed the Constitutional Convention and the ratification debate, wrote a substantial portion of the Federalist Papers and drafted the Bill of Rights. Along the way, as Ellis recounts, Madison was forced to part with his deeply held belief in federal supremacy and to embrace, instead, the blurrier concept of dual sovereignty - the idea of a nation caught, eternally, somewhere in the balance between state and federal authority. Madison came to see this tension as the genius of the Constitution: "the great asset," as Ellis puts it, "that ensured the argument could never end" and granted future generations the freedom to interpret the Constitution in ways that were relevant to changing circumstances. As Jefferson wrote, "laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind." It would never have occurred to Madison, therefore, that the Constitution should dictate every answer or foreclose all debate, no matter what is said at meetings of the Federalist Society or in Supreme Court confirmation hearings. As Ellis argues, the prevailing conservative doctrine of "originalism" is a pose that rests on a fiction: the idea that there is a "single source of constitutional truth back there at the founding," easily discovered by any judge who cares to see it. As a historian, Ellis takes particular offense at the machinations made by Justice Antonin Scalia in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) - a sophist's masterpiece of an opinion that concluded the founders sought to arm the American people without limit and without end. Though Scalia is gone, his ideology remains ascendant, while Madison's heirs, the proponents of a "living Constitution," are "on the permanent defensive." History, to that end, is bastardized, sanitized and turned into talking points. Ellis has addressed current issues before, in interviews and essays. (The chapter on originalism draws on a 2010 Washington Post op-ed.) But never in his books. It will no doubt be jarring for some readers to find, amid mentions of the Ordinance of 1784 and Shays' Rebellion, references to the Koch brothers and police brutality. But Ellis writes with insight and acuity in the present tense, just as he always has in the past tense, and in "American Dialogue" he draws connections between our history and our present reality with an authority that few other authors can muster. It may cost him some of his readership on the right, but Ellis, clearly, has reached the limit of his tolerance for the mythical, indeed farcical, notion that the anti-Federalists won the argument in the late 18 th century, or that the founders, to a man, stood for small and weak government, unrestrained market capitalism, unfettered gun ownership and the unlimited infusion of money into the political sphere. There is a healthy argument to be had about the legacy of the founders, but as this book makes clear, it has to start with the facts. Ellis's subject is not only the founding era but also the discussion between past and present. JEFF shesol, the author of "Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court," is currently at work on a book about the space race of the early 1960s.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Eliis (Revolutionary Summer, 2013), a Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling historian, is aware of the difficulties and dangers implicit in seeking answers to our current debates and dilemmas in the archives of the Founding Fathers, yet he attempts to do so here, and his effort to apply the views of four historical icons to current political conflicts is interesting and useful. On the topic of racial relations, Ellis refers to Thomas Jefferson and seems to delight in pointing out Jefferson's inconsistencies and contradictions on the topic. Considering political equality, Ellis turns to John Adams, who didn't view equality as the natural political order and didn't share Jefferson's faith in the wisdom of the people; in fact, he viewed a very powerful executive as necessary to protect the public from both an emerging elite and themselves. On foreign policy, Ellis turns to Washington, who strove to manage foreign relations with Native nations and maintain American neutrality between France and Britain. Ellis is provocative and interesting and reminds us that our present controversies are not unique or new. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Ellis joins other best-selling historians currently seeking perspective, including Doris Kearns Goodwin, with a sure-to-be roundly publicized examination of American conundrums.--Jay Freeman Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The founders have much to tell us about current problems, none of it simple, according to this incisive study of American political creeds. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Ellis (American Sphinx) probes the writings of four Revolutionary War leaders on issues of ideology and governance that still roil America. Thomas Jefferson's hypocritical racial attitudes-he both deplored slavery (while owning dozens of slaves, some of them his own children) and believed that blacks could not live with whites as equals-frame Ellis's discussion of the menace of modern racism; John Adams's doubts about the feasibility of achieving true social equality underpin a look at rising economic inequality since the Reagan administration; James Madison's attempts to convert the early U.S. from a federation to a nation-state spark a critique of Supreme Court conservatives' originalist philosophy of jurisprudence; and George Washington's weary realism about popular passions, human fallibility, and the difficulty of spreading republican values to foreign lands prompts a dissection of the failures of recent American military adventures. Ellis's passions sometimes show, as in his criticism of Justice Antonin Scalia's writings on the Second Amendment. Still, his colorful, nuanced portraits of these outsized but very human personalities and shrewd analyses of their philosophies make for a compelling case for the troubled but vital legacy of the founding generation. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Ellis (Founding Brothers) connects readers with history to enable them to formulate salient questions for the pivotal debate about U.S. destiny-a conversation he hopes to revitalize. There should be constant dialog about the past and present, he argues, but during these divided times, Americans lack a sense of national unity and the ability to converse about the present and future, informed by the past. Drawing from his intimate knowledge of the Founding Fathers, Ellis addresses four 21st-century obstacles to reveal truths from their writings that should infuse wisdom into present-day debate: Thomas Jefferson's inconsistency on slavery and race; John Adams's warnings about financial aristocracy and economic inequality; James Madison's politically expedient concessions and the idea of original intent; and George Washington's approach to national and foreign policy, and the incompatibility of American imperialism with revolutionary ideals. Each discussion relates the historical lessons to the ongoing problem. Finally, Ellis explains why the ingenious but flawed founders were uniquely suited for revolution and government-creating. VERDICT Ellis's compelling historical examples and astute analysis will raise questions and ignite debate. This work should be read by academics and general readers alike. [See Prepub Alert, 4/23/18.]-Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An eminent historian sharply illuminates the "messy moment" of the nation's founding and its implications for contemporary America.Ellis (Emeritus, History/Mount Holyoke Coll.; The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789, 2015, etc.), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, offers a lucid and authoritative examination of America's tumultuous beginnings, when the Founding Fathers grappled with issues of race, income inequality, law, and foreign policyall issues that still vex the nation. Believing that history is "an ongoing conversation between past and present," the author asks what Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Adams can teach us today. "What did all men are created equal' mean then and now? Did the pursuit of happiness' imply the right to some semblance of economic equality? Does it now?" These and other salient questions inform Ellis' vivid depiction of the controversies swirling as the Constitution was drafted and ratified. The Founders were men of deep contradictions and evolving political views. As a young man, for example, Jefferson "insisted that the central principles of the American Revolution were inherently incompatible with slavery." The older Jefferson, who owned hundreds of slaves and fathered many children with his slave Sally Hemings, fervently believed that races should not mix. Slaves should be freed, he conceded, and then sent to the unpopulated West, Santo Domingo, or Liberia. As to equality, the Founders "were a self-conscious elite" who did not value "the innate wisdom of the common man." John Adams' "prognosis for the American future was a plutocratic aristocracy." Freedom to pursue wealth, he asserted, "essentially ensured the triumph of inequality." Ellis places Washington's famous warning against foreign entanglements in the context of westward expansion, Native American removal, and postwar negotiations. Most fascinating is the author's cogent critique of constitutional originalists, intent on recovering "the mentality and language of the framers on their own terms in their own time."A discerning, richly detailed inquiry into America's complex political and philosophical legacy. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Preface My Self-Evident Truth "History is always unfinished in the sense that the future always uses its past in new ways." - Peter Gay, Style in History (1974) Self-evident truths are especially alluring because, by definition, no one needs to explain why they are true. The most famous example of this lovely paradox, which gave the term its name, is the second paragraph in the Declaration of Independence (i.e. "We hold these truths to be self-evident"), where Thomas Jefferson surreptitiously imbedded the creedal statement of the American promise. The ironies abound, since Jefferson almost certainly did not know he was drafting the American Creed, and subsequent generations worshipped his words for reasons different than he intended. Moreover, his initial draft described the truths as "sacred and undeniable," and it was probably Benjamin Franklin who suggested the change to "self-evident." But, in the end, such nettlesome details have proven powerless against the sweeping influence of Jefferson's message, which defined the terms of the liberal tradition in American history. My professional life as a writer and teacher of American history has been informed by another self-evident truth. As I try to put it into words, I worry that the very act of self-conscious articulation might drain away the unconscious magic of my working assumption and expose it as an illusion. But let me try. It goes like this: the study of history is an ongoing conversation between past and present from which we all have much to learn. There, having said it, I can see that the formulation is helpfully vague. It does not dictate what we can learn, and therefore casts a wide net that gathers in a messy variety of both personal and public lessons. Most of my experience comes from forty-plus years of teaching in a liberal arts college, where there is less distance between students and faculty. In such schools communication does not end with graduation, but lives on in a feed-back loop about the relevance and irrelevance of what had been learned years ago. The dominant pattern was a random and wholly unpredictable kind of relevance. There was the Chinese student who had done a research paper for me on the Massachusetts Constitution, which was drafted singlehandedly by John Adams. This served as the inspiration, so she claimed, for her work back in Shanghai, writing a putative constitution for post-communist China. At her twenty-fifth reunion another student told me that her career as a corporate executive had been influenced by two lectures on the Civil War, one from the northern, the other from the southern perspective, which helped her to think ironically. Several former students, both women and men, reported that their efforts to negotiate the inescapable tension between career and family were informed by their reading of Abigail Adams's letters, citing most especially her indomitable resilience. Such examples suggest that I was not completely fooling myself in believing that history has something to teach us all, even though it was impossible to know at the moment of learning just what that something might be. Self-conscious attempts to teach or preach relevance in history are therefore unnecessary, because the connection between then and now is imbedded in the enterprise, fated to emerge in the future in unforeseeable ways. In that sense, reading history is like expanding your memory further back in time, and the more history you learn, the larger the memory bank you can draw on when life takes a turn for which you are otherwise unprepared.   ***   Obviously, a few reassuring testimonials from former students do not a compelling case make. But since my belief in history's utility was an unquestioned article of faith, it did not require overwhelming evidence, only sufficient support to sustain its credibility. And on that score the historical record provided several dramatic illustrations of a usable past that caught my eye. My two favorite examples featured John Adams during the American Revolution and Abraham Lincoln on the issue of slavery. In June of 1776 Adams wrote to several friends in Boston, asking them to scour the Harvard library for books on military history, especially accounts of the Peloponnesian and Punic wars. He had just been appointed head of the Board of War and Ordnance, effectively making him secretary of war, a post for which he freely admitted he was wholly unprepared. He decided to give himself a crash course on how to manage an army. Over the ensuing months he bombarded George Washington and the general officers of the Continental Army with advice gleaned from his reading. His most relevant strategic suggestion, which was based on his analysis of the battles between Thebes and Sparta as recorded by Thucydides, was to adopt a defensive strategy, what he called "a war of posts." Much like the Spartans, Adams argued, the British were virtually invincible on a conventional battlefield, so the Continental Army should engage only when it enjoyed tactical superiority in numbers or terrain. Such advice cut against all of Washington's aggressive instincts, but he eventually, if reluctantly, embraced it. The result was a protracted war that the British had to win, while the Americans had only not to lose. This proved a more attainable goal, eventually achieved when the British abandoned the conflict after the battle of Yorktown in 1781. In 1858 Abraham Lincoln also began a research project, in his case focused on the records of the Constitutional Convention and the early histories of that seminal event. Lincoln's research was prompted by the landmark Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott v Sanford (1857), in which Chief Justice Roger Taney, writing for the majority, ruled that the framers of the Constitution regarded slaves as property rather than persons, meaning that slave-owners could not be deprived of their property without their consent, which led to the conclusion that any law prohibiting slavery in the western territories was unconstitutional. Lincoln's reading of history led him to a dramatically different conclusion, namely that many of the founders sought to limit slavery's expansion, a view which he presented in its fullest form in his Cooper Union Address (1860). He discovered that twenty-one of the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution were on record for banning or restricting slavery in the territories. Both Washington and Jefferson, as well as sixteen signers, endorsed the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River. Jefferson had even wanted to ban slavery in all the new territories. As for the larger question of slavery itself, Lincoln argued that the founding generation regarded it as a moral embarrassment that clearly defied the principles announced in the Declaration of Independence, which was the major reason the delegates in Philadelphia refused to permit the toxic term to contaminate the language of the Constitution. As Lincoln described them, the founders thought of slavery as a cancer they could not surgically remove without killing the infant American republic in the cradle. Throughout the trials and tribulations of America's bloodiest war, Lincoln maintained he was acting as the agent of the founding generation, so that the Union cause spoke for the true meaning of the American Revolution. It is worth noting that both Adams and Lincoln went back to the past with explicit political agendas, which is to say that they knew what they were looking for. So, for that matter, did Chief Justice Tanney, who harbored a proslavery agenda. By definition, all efforts to harvest the accumulated wisdom of the past must begin from a location in the present, so the questions posed of the past are inevitably shaped either consciously or unconsciously by the historical context in which they are asked. Unlike my former students, who discovered relevant historical insights later in life, almost accidentally, the Adams and Lincoln examples were self-conscious attempts to generate historical evidence in support of preferred outcomes. When it comes to the writing of relevant history, there are no immaculate conceptions. This is an inconvenient truth that most historians acknowledge under their breath, admitting that objectivity, in the sense that mathematicians or physicists use the term, is not a realistic goal for historians. The best they can strive for is some measure of detachment, which serves the useful purpose of stigmatizing the most flagrant forms of ideological prejudice (i.e. cherry picking the evidence to claim that Thomas Jefferson was an evangelical Christian or Andrew Jackson a New Deal Democrat.) But if you believe that the study of history is an ongoing conversation between past and present, detachment itself is delusional. In his Style in History (1974) Peter Gay put the point succinctly: "History is always unfinished in the sense that the future always uses the past in new ways." In fact, the past is not history, but a much vaster region of the dead, gone, unknowable or forgotten. History is what we choose to remember, and we have no alternative but to do our choosing now.   ***   My goal in the pages that follow is to provide a round-trip ticket to the late eighteenth century, then back to our location in the second decade of the twenty-first. The founding era has been chosen as a destination for two reasons: first, of all of the terrain in American history, I know it best; second, it produced the Big Bang that created all the planets and orbits in our political universe, thereby establishing the institutional framework for what is still an ongoing argument about our destiny as a people and a nation. Thus my title. The questions we will be carrying back to the founding from our sliver of time in the present are inescapably shaped by our location in a divided America that is currently incapable of sustained argument and unsure of its destiny. We inhabit a backlash moment in American history of uncertain duration. Our creedal convictions as Americans, all of which have their origin in the founding era, are bumping up against four unforeseen and unprecedented obstacles: the emergence of a truly multiracial society; the inherent inequalities of a globalized economy; the sclerotic blockages of an aging political architecture; and the impossible obligations facing any world power once the moral certainties provided by the Cold War vanished. These obstacles became more difficult to negotiate in 2016, when the most inexperienced, uninformed, and divisive presidential candidate in American history occupied the Oval Office. The Now sections of the ensuing chapters represent my effort to place each of these topical areas--race, income inequality, jurisprudence, and foreign policy--in historical context by viewing them as recent entries in longstanding patterns. The Then sections focus on specific founders, chosen in part because of their prominence, but mostly because, based on my previous work in their papers, each founder speaks with special resonance to the subject under scrutiny. Much in the way the founders went back to the Greek and Roman classics for guidance during the political crisis of their time, we are going back to the founders, our classics, in ours. Our goal, then, is to learn more about our origins in the fond hope that doing so will allow us to frame the salient questions of our own time with greater wisdom than we are currently able to muster on our own. Moreover, the very act of posing such questions also enhances the prospects of viewing the founders themselves from new angles that cast their legacy in a different light. We can safely assume that the dialogue between now and then is an interactive process possessing the potential to change both sides of the chronological equation. Although the founders are busy being dead, they still speak to use in the vast archive of letters and documents they left behind. The historical record is so rich because the revolutionary generation realized that they were "present at the creation" and therefore preserved their thoughts in the belief that posterity would want to remember them. Over the years, a small army of editors has worked assiduously on that preservation project, producing the fullest account of any political elite in recorded history. My attempt to recover the American Dialogue is wholly dependent on that documentary record. Of course, the suggestion that there is an ongoing conversation across the centuries is a literary conceit, but we pay homage to the dialogue every time we cite the seminal texts of the founding to fortify our current convictions. As a lovely song once put it, the fundamental things apply, as time goes by. In the pages that follow I will try to do justice to both sides of the dialogue. What did "all men are created equal" mean then and now? Did the "pursuit of happiness" imply the right to some semblance of economic equality? Does it now? Who were included in "We the people" then? Who is included now? Is it historically correct to describe the United States as an "exceptional" nation? If so, what are its current implications? Did the founders leave a legacy of government as "us" or "them"? If the correct answer is both, which legacy best meets our needs now? Given our current condition as a deeply divided people, my hope is that the founding era can become a safe place to gather together, not so much to find answers to those questions as to argue about them. Indeed, if I read the founders right, their greatest legacy is the recognition that argument itself is the answer. Excerpted from American Dialogue: The Founding Fathers and Us by Joseph J. Ellis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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