Archive for the ‘ Early American ’ Category

Mr. Madison’s Weird War

NY Review

I had to tell you about this, because this article is so good. If you are not interested in the War of 1812, however, just hit the Delete button.

I liked this paragraph especially:

The burning of Washington and other defeats, the many misjudgments, the poor appointments, and the bureaucratic snafus all reveal that the War of 1812 was not Madison’s finest hour. He may have been at times a very successful practical politician, but he was not a decider. He was a legislator, not a natural executive; he was someone who sought to persuade, not command. Believing devoutly in republican principles, he was ill at ease in exercising executive authority. He was, as Henry Clay privately admitted, “wholly unfit for the storms of war.”

Four books are reviewed here, but I think Mr. and Mrs. Madison’s War: America’s First Couple and the Second War of Independence is the one I would pick to read (or more likely to listen to, since Audible has it too).

But I can hear the universal whining clear down here in Costa Rica – “I don’t have the time!”

The richest people in the world don’t have any time! James Madison would be ashamed of us.

2012
06/08
CATEGORY
Early American
History
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The Divine Origins of America

Americans have always been a religious people. The extent of their religiosity always amazes Europeans, who are more secular. In America it even makes sense to talk of a secular religion. Or of A Nation With the Soul of a Church (Chesterton, Mead).

They were talking about America’s unconscious culture, which always has to be inferred from its actions. And Americans will frequently deny motivations that are obvious to anyone else.

For example, other scholars have showed the effect of economic interests in early America, including the American Revolution and the Constitution. Americans were furious, and hotly denied that the Founding Fathers had ever been tainted by something so crass as money.

They firmly believe America acts only from the purest interests. Unbelievable as this belief is, it follows directly from their belief in their own divine nature – which they do believe in, firmly. They have the right to judge everyone else, but no one has the right to judge them.

America’s decline is no doubt due in part to this belief. One is tempted to make comparisons to other civilizations in decline – who also thought very highly of themselves, and their religions, at the time.

2012
06/06
CATEGORY
Early American
History
Philosophy
Religion
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The First Industry Was Global Trade

People have been trading with each other forever. But that was never what we refer to now as Trade. For one thing, it is now orders of magnitude larger – and though everyone denies it, it has become something different entirely: an entire complex of activities – which is typical of any industry.

Central to this complex was a new technology: the Sailing Ship that could journey to any place on the globe – routinely. This capability made the conquest of less-developed peoples (and their raw materials) irresistible. The making of ships (according to standard plans), and their maintenance became a subsidiary industry. At the same time banking expanded greatly. And joint-stock companies were invented to limit the risk and make investment in these trading ventures easier. But above all, many jobs were created – and a whole new class of people were created: the workers (the sailors).

In 18th and and 19th Century America a major industry was land trading, where fortunes could be made in a hurry (at the expense of the Indians). The people we now romanticize as settlers or pioneers were motivated mostly by greed (sometimes with religious overtones).

These land grabs merged seamlessly, in the South, with the development of large plantations devoted to the production of agricultural products for export (using slave labor). Their owners were always in debt to their British suppliers for all the luxury products they craved.

The irony of this was nowhere more extreme than in Thomas Jefferson, whose slaves were sold on his death to help pay his enormous debts. But he never ceased to think of himself as a simple farmer. And opposed any attempts  to create an commercial society.

2012
06/05
CATEGORY
Early American
Economy
History
Technology
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The American Revolution Was a Stupid Idea

I am not talking about the basic idea here, but its timing. If it had not been for France (and the French Fleet in particular) we would have lost the war. The British had to supply their troops entirely from a home base on the other side of the Atlantic. When the French Fleet started blockading the American ports, the war was over. Britain has spread itself too thin, and had to back off.

It was able to defeat the French Fleet later – and go on to build an empire. But that was later.

Much earlier, it failed to understand its American colonies, its most valuable possession – and lost them. History would have been much different if England has been smarter. The Americans were not much smarter – but they lucked out.

If they had been smarter, they would have carefully thought out their military situation, and devised a winning strategy before going to war. This would have involved something new: guerrilla warfare, which they could have learned easily from the Indians.

Benjamin Franklin even thought our troops should have used the bow and arrow – a good idea actually, since America had limited arms manufacturing capability and no gunpowder at all.

George Washington’s strategy left a lot to be desired. He could have dismissed his troops and sent them home for the winter – instead of keeping them at Valley Forge – and not attacking the British comfortably wintering in nearby New York even once!

When the British had to evacuate Philadelphia, this would have been the ideal time to have attacked them on their long trek out. But this was not done.

Washington was not much of a general, but was an excellent politician who managed to hold the country together then – and later during the Constitutional Convention and as its first President (a job he came to detest thoroughly).

2012
05/26
CATEGORY
Early American
History
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The Common Good

I am learning about the Revolution of 1800, as I am listening to Empire of Liberty. I find this history as interesting as any novel, and I keep wondering why more Americans aren’t interested.

This election marked a fundamental shift in the way Americans thought about themselves – basically they stopped thinking and started acting like everyone else. And they stopped being interested in the common good as they had during the Revolution, and started being interested only in themselves.

Some deep philosophical issues were involved here, which still have not been resolved. But something else was happening: people were changing too.

And this is what Americans do not want to know: they were changing for the worse. They were no longer interested in the common good, and did not think such a thing ever existed, or could exist.

2012
05/22
CATEGORY
Early American
History
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The First General in George Washington’s Life Was His Mother

I am listening to Washington: A Life - the first good biography of our first President. As the author Ron Chernow says, this is because Washington concealed his true nature too well in public life. He only revealed his inner self in his many letters – which have only lately been made available to scholars.

George’s father, widowed with young children to raise, probably chose his second wife too hastily, thinking he could later tame her. But this never happened and this wife outlived him. Washington inherited his fathers strong constitution – but also died young.

This morning, I picked up the tidbit that forms the title of this posting. Washington had a complicated heritage that he never tried to fathom himself – something that my father’s family did not either, sensing (correctly) it was something best left alone.

2012
05/12
CATEGORY
Early American
1 comment

Lack of Love

This is something I am an expert on. I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect it is a common condition. And an unrecognized one, because recognizing it is painful – and who wants more pain in their lives? Not me.

But as I said last time, I got the bright idea of becoming better acquainted with myself – and after considerable stumbling in the dark, came across this unexpected discovery. Which, now I have some time to think about it, feels like something I have known all along.

It reminded me of my first therapist – a cousin of mine. Yes, you got that right; he and I grew up together, our families lived only about a mile apart on the banks of the Mississippi River in Illinois. Our extended family was extremely religious, and this religiosity was a fundamental part of our upbringing – which was more like our downbringing.

There was no love in our family, this was entirely unknown – as I suspect is common in situations like this, where religion is a form of mass insanity. But as I started to say, this was my childhood – and the childhood of my cousin, whose mother was my mother’s sister. Their mother (my maternal grandmother) lived part way between their house and ours, on the river that was part of our lives. She was also religious, to an extreme degree – and thought of little else. Got the picture?

My cousin went to college, became a psychologist, and I became his first patient. I had become an electronic engineer with a traveling job, and spent many of my weekends traveling to see my therapist – where we spends hours at a time working on my problems.

This was a form of love – which the therapeutic situation is supposed to include. But our love, due to our family involvement, was – I hate to say it – incestuous. I case you are wondering, I hasten to add that there was nothing sexual about it. It is hard to explain, but it was exclusive.

When I became involved with Beth, and then married her, he felt I had betrayed him – and broke off our relationship. I didn’t see him again for many years, at a family reunion – where he was a charming as he could be (one of his special talents).

This brings to mind Thomas Jefferson, of all people! He could also be charming – but as Abigail Adams did not hesitate to say: deceitful, devious, and power-grasping. And also, for the purposes of this discussion - unacquainted with love. He idealized his wife (always a bad sign) who died young.

He promptly found a replacement in one of his slaves , who was a half-sister to his departed wife (a not uncommon practice in his social class), and had a number of children by her. This was unnoticed by his family, and everyone else, for many years. Historians, comparing the dates of her births, with his presidential activities, could only conclude that Jefferson must have made many hurried trips back to Monticello to visit her.

However, hypocrisy is very much part of the American tradition. George Washington has been rightly idealized as the Father of his Country, but he had no children of his own, even though his wife had several children by a previous marriage. It was been suggested that he married her for her money, which makes sense. In any case, it is clear that he permitted no familiarity from anyone (including his wife, evidently) – and was famous for this. But let me return to my lowly self.

In my family there was no love either, as the most casual observer could, and still can, see. It is considered optional, and not necessary. And, I suspect, not even desirable, to judge by our behavior. I know I have fended it off, successfully, whenever it threatened.

My ex, whose family also belonged to the same church, were even more religious. As our marriage progressed, she became violent, interpreting my advances as physical threats. And, despite my best efforts, drove me off – and later killed herself. I should add that for awhile we were extremely sexual – perhaps hoping to cover up our animosity. And I have been suspicious ever since of sexual advances, interpreting them (sometimes accurately, I am sure) as manipulative behavior.

Psychologists (and novelists and playwrights) have pointed out, over and over, that sex can be associated with almost any motivation – and love is only one of these motivations. And in many social situations, such as the middle-class Midwest I grew up in, it was rare. My parents disliked each other – but that was so common it was not noticed, and not considered important. They were respectable, and that was all that mattered.

2012
05/06
CATEGORY
Early American
Philosophy
Psychology
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Americans Were Once Real

It sometimes takes awhile for me to understand myself – to figure out what is going on in my deep self. My deep self and my surface self are two different beings – and they often do not communicate very well. It takes awhile for my surface self, who has to use words, to understand what is going on deeper.

Lately, I have been obsessed with early American history – with discovering who those people were. I read a review in the New York Review about the Adams (John and Abigail), and it mentioned how important sensibility was to their time. So I got the book Sensibility and the American Revolution. The author, Sarah Knott, was talking about a people I never heard of before – and one historians have only discovered recently. I immediately ordered another book The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787.

I was shocked when I first saw it: it is a huge thing, written mainly for historians. It cost me 20 bucks just to fly it in from Miami. I will never finish reading it, and it is far too technical for me – but I still enjoy reading it. For the simple reason that it gives me a feeling for the time. Historians are beginning to grapple with fuzzy subjects –  ones that take literary skills to explain. Such subjects have to be understood as wholes, not parts. Too much analysis destroys them.  And the trend towards analysis dominated American history after this period. Only recently have we been trying to put it all together again.

As a result, I have been discovering who we really were at the end of the 18th Century. A very different people indeed from what we are now. To put in bluntly: back then we were real – now we are not.

Back in the Sixties and Seventies my social subset was concerned with being real - and Gestalt therapy (and to a lesser extent Encounter Groups) were our thing. In Denver, where I was living at the time, a young woman acquaintance of mine set up People House, where we could attend workshops on personal growth on weekends. A frequent presenter of these workshops had been the publisher for Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy. His publishing house was Real People Press. I knew the couple who set up the Gestalt Institute of Denver. All of us would go for skinny-dips in their Jacuzzi. We assumed the world was getting better – and we were helping it to become better.

This didn’t happen. The whole scene simply evaporated and was forgotten. This is what was happening to American as a whole: it was evaporating and being forgotten. A process that had been going on, off and on, for two hundred years.

So what happened? How were Americans then different from what they are now? I have compiled a check list:

  • They were interested in ideas – all kinds of ideas.
  • They were interested in discussing these ideas – passionately so, and at great length.
  • They were writing about these ideas – copiously. Printers could hardly keep up with the demand.
  • They were reading about them, and bought as many books as they could afford or borrow.
  • They were passionately interested in things like justice and human rights – and were quite willing to go to war over them – even though, in retrospect, their grievances were relatively minor.

What is America like now? Simply negate all of the above. We are a pale shadow of our former selves. We are still leading the world – but in the wrong direction. This is also true of all of what once had been the most advanced countries in the world: England, France, Germany – and even places like Iceland.

We are no longer.

2011
05/31
CATEGORY
Early American
History
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What the Founding Fathers Were Really Like

I am going to rely on two books here: Sensibility and the American Revolution and The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787. From page ix of the later:

One of most important historical discoveries that has taken place in the decades since I wrote this book has been the discovery of the importance of politeness to eighteenth Century Anglo-American culture. (My emphasis.)

He does not even mention sensibililty, which is practically the same thing – but also much more. Historians seem to have their own blind spots, and their own cliques. But to continue:

To the most enlightened, like Thomas Jefferson, sociability became the contemporary substitute for classical virtue. The antique version of self-sacrifice was now seen by some as too austere, too forbidding, too harsh for the civilized eighteenth Century. People needed a virtue that demanded less in the way of service to the state and more in the way of getting along with others in society. Unlike the classical virtue of the past, which was martial and masculine, this virtue was soft and feminized and capable of being expressed by women and well as men…

Classical virtue had flowed from the citizen’s participation on politics; government had been the source of his civic consciousness and public spiritedness. But for many in the eighteenth Century, virtue now flowed from from the citizen’s participation in society, not in government, which the most enlightened saw as the source of the evils of the world. “Society,” said Thomas Paine, “is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness: the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions.”

It was society, not politics, that bred the new domesticated virtue of politeness. Mingling in drawing rooms, clubs, coffee houses, and even counting houses – partaking of the innumerable interchanges of the daily comings and goings of modern life, including those of the marketplace – created affection, fellow feeling, credit, and trust that bound people together in the natural harmony of the social world that was as marvelous to the eighteenth Century as the discovery of the force of gravity in th natural world.

What happened to this politeness?

2011
05/26
CATEGORY
Early American
History
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Sensibility and the American Revolution

This is the name of a book I am reading now.

It is about sensibility, something I never heard of, before I read an article in the New York Review: Those Sentimental Americans, where I also got the link to the book. The author, Sarah Knott, has picked a slippery subject, but her writing ability can cope with it. I quote from the Introduction to the book. From page 19:

The careful synthesis of reason and feeling on which sensibility depended was fragile…The sense of betrayal at once highlights the central premise of this book, that sensibility was a constituent element of revolution, and the falling short of the American goal of a sympathetic society to secure life, liberty, and happiness’s pursuit.

This explains something that has always baffled me: why did Thomas Jefferson change Locke’s “Life, Liberty, and Property” to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?” Surely the Founding Fathers were vitally concerned with their property. Why the substitution of something so ephemeral as happiness? Because Revolutionary culture was saturated with sensibility – something that has since been forgotten – much to our detriment. From page 20:

They were concerned with individual self-formation, the active creation of social bonds, instrumental action, and institution building.

The sentimental project built on a set of practices of self among members of the long revolutionary generation, such as sympathetic friendship, that made sensibility locally familiar and recognizable and revolutionizing American society seem possible.

Sensibility emerges, not as a rather ephemeral, amorphous, and fictional language…but as a way of understanding and being in a world that held value at a certain historical moment for very specific reasons.

Here again, this world has vanished entirely. From page 21:

These political creeds conjured two rather distinct types: the republican subject, controlling passion with reason and earning political agency for the common good, and the liberal subject, yearning in full pursuit of personal happiness, rational self-interest, and private gain. Whether self-abnegating in republican mode or self-centered in liberal fashion, both types prized autonomy.

In the Founding Fathers, both types were active – although the second type of activity has been soft-pedaled by Americans intent on idealizing them.

At the present time, the liberalism has been converted to neoliberalism. And the common good has been forgotten entirely.

2011
05/17
CATEGORY
Early American
Morality
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