It seems America’s founding fathers have never been more popular. Americans have often been filled with patriotic nostalgia about the birth of the republic and the figures that toiled to make it so, but there is a renewed interest, fuelled by new research and fresh interpretations.
In recent years, new biographies of George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton have featured in the national bestseller lists. Stories of the founders, the revolution and the creation of the constitution are a staple of the Pulitzer Prizes. There have been many new exhibitions, lectures, documentaries and movies about these men and the other principal founders, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
The nature of the scholarship has swung from sentimental and undiluted praise, to condemnation, charges of hypocrisy and ridicule. But the finer historians have sought a balance: respecting their achievements while not being uncritical about their shortcomings. The search to truly understand them, in all their complexities and contradictions, is what drives the interest.
Among the recent books examining the founders and their legacy is the distinguished writer and political activist Gore Vidal’s Inventing a Nation. Vidal recalls a ‘bright morning’ conversation with President John F. Kennedy that provided the motive for his book. Kennedy asked how a ‘... backwoods country like this, with only three million people, could have produced three great geniuses of the 18th century—Franklin, Jefferson and Hamilton?’ Vidal answered, flippantly, ‘Time. They had more of it … They read. Wrote letters. Apparently, thought, something no longer done—in public life.’ Now, some 40 years later, Vidal provides a more detailed reply to Kennedy’s question.
Vidal approaches the birth of the republic principally through three figures: Washington, Adams and Jefferson. In his examination of the founding, he describes Washington’s ‘passive eminence’, the truly ‘great collaborators’ Hamilton and Madison, and the ‘godfathers’ Adams and Jefferson. From here Vidal travels back and forth visiting the revolutionary wars, the continental congresses and the early years of the republic.
Vidal describes the competing ideas and values in the creation of a national government, the relationships between the protagonists, and the infighting that characterised Washington’s two presidential terms. He reminds us that none of it was inevitable or easy; it was a long struggle that required not only wisdom but compromise.
This is not a misty-eyed portrayal of the greatest of great men. Vidal does not ignore their collective arrogance or the political skulduggery that characterised the new nation’s