M&D-related: "a reality check to a Founders-obsessed nation"

[pynchonoid]

Atlantic Unbound | August 7, 2003 
Interviews 
 
Ordinary People 
H. W. Brands argues that too much reverence for the
Founding Fathers is unhealthy—and that it's time to
take them down a notch or two 

[...] In "Founders Chic" (September Atlantic), the
historian H. W. Brands offers a reality check to a
Founders-obsessed nation. From the newspapers of the
Founders' own time, Brands points to some typically
hostile opinions on the part of their contemporaries:
Washington is said to have a "cold hermaphrodite
faculty" that is responsible for his false reputation
as a man of "prudence, moderation and impartiality";
John Adams is mocked for his "sesquipedality of
belly"; and Thomas Jefferson is called "a
mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a
half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto
father." Not only were the Founders anything but
deified in their own time, they were also held
responsible by later generations for some of the young
nation's most severe problems—and the questions they
left unresolved did have serious ramifications, most
notably the contradictions over slavery that
eventually led to the Civil War. Through all this, the
Founders have emerged as heroes, particularly in times
demanding national unity; they have served as symbolic
anchors of nationhood during the post-Civil War
Reconstruction period, the World Wars, and again
today. 

[...] one point that I make in the article is that
this notion of reverence for the Founders was an
explicitly, deliberately unifying factor after the
Civil War. Until the Civil War, the criticism of the
Founders was quite broadly based. They were hammered
from both sides in the sectional dispute, either for
or against slavery. But after the Civil War, both
North and South were looking for something that they
could do to pull the country back together. They went
back to the generation that fought the Revolution,
invoking a time when everybody in America was fighting
on the same side against a foreign foe rather than
fighting one another. It's during the period from
about 1875 to 1900 that we first get this notion that
the period of the American Revolution was a golden
age, and we've lived with that memory ever since. 

[...] If you look at the kind of books that sell
really well, they tend to be books that make the
readers come away thinking, Gosh, I feel good about
America now. But I am nervous about the notion of
patriotism per se. I am very hesitant to call anybody
a hero. I think the term is vastly overused. Now, I
know good and well that people love to read about
heroes because it allows them to transcend their own
generation—it's one of the reasons that there's this
reverence for the Founders. It's kind of nice to think
that as muddy and compromised as our generation might
be, there was a time when giants walked the earth.
Well, in fact I don't believe that, so I would have a
real hard time writing it. [...] 

<http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2003-08-07.htm>

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