Paper I wrote for grad school

[ashling]

In this course we read out of oneor more books plus a plethora of handouts (reviews by prominent historians, etc.) Every week someone is assigned to writ a short review on the main reading, weaving in the handout material. This week I was up. The book was y Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy{/u}pp. 72-140, and reviews about the founders and other historical issues. Anyway, here is what I wrote. Went over pretty well. I would appreciate your comments.

Say what you will about Tom Jefferson, the man could absolutely turn a phrase. Where today could you hear of “Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council … who have had their heads shaved by the harlot England.” With this he almost singlehandedly invented the political gaffe and started a firestorm of controversy – and all without the help of You Tube.
Jefferson’s Republicans and the more democratic Democrat-Republican societies brought other long lasting changes to politics. The political organizing and campaigning of the era was seminal to our political campaigns of today. The period saw a democratizing influence which affected the very system by enfranchising voters and bringing about other important changes which have been, to quote Dahl, “jury rigged into the informal constitutional structure.”
Wilentz is no slouch himself when it comes to finding just the right word. Thus, we read that the French government of Napoleon was “marinated” in corruption. He might also have suggested that their tea totaling adversaries across the channel were ‘steeped’ in foreign intrigue. “The American Republic was founded amid the misfortunes of two European empires (Rothschild).” If, as it has been said, we are condemned to repeat the unlearned lessons of history, we had better pay special attention to Wilentz and Rothschild. We must not forget what it is like to be the plaything of empires in the age of our own. It is with this in mind that it seems expedient to heed Dahl’s caveats about our own system before we go playing democratic Prometheus to the world.
External fiddling can strike discordant notes within. Rothschild notes that the imperial policies of France wrought “military commissions” and “special courts to try persons suspected of favoring the enemy.” These same notes played here at home in the Alien and Sedition acts throwing aside habeas corpus and other rights. Madison wrote that this Patriot Act of 1798, as it may rightly be called, would likely “eventually destroy our free system of government (Rothschild).”
And empires, of course, have to be defended from within as well as from without. These things should be “engraved on the American mind,” according to Madison, “that liberty does not survive a standing army,” and that “the fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defence against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad (Rothschild).”
In 1789, Noah Webster noted that Americans had “considered the revolution as completed when it had just begun (Rentschlar).” In 1800 they experienced a “second revolution.” If so, it was, according to Wilentz, a “tortuous” one. Due, he writes, to a combination of new found Federalist unity with “antidemocratic biases of state election laws,” the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. There, due to political intrigue and the personal animus of Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson beat out Aaron Burr for the presidency by only one vote. This is not what the framers had in mind. Though this defect has been ameliorated somewhat by the direct election of electors, we are reminded by Dahl, that this power is only on loan.
Though Wilentz does not negate the importance of the issue of slavery to the young republic and its 3rd President, he does not go as far as others, such as Roger G. Kennedy ( Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause) , and particularly Conor Cruise O’Brien (Wilentz, footnote 91, Chapt. 4) in “debunking” Jefferson for his positions on this and other issues. Wilentz goes to some length to refute O’Brien in his Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Thomas Jefferson, subtitled: How a slaveholder and ideologue was also a great democrat. Though not the subject of this review, this article is worth reading as well.
Bailyn admits that Jefferson’s anomalies and inconsistencies “seem endless.” He suggests that the key to understanding these inconsistencies in lie in Jefferson’s dual character. Jefferson was “simultaneously a radical utopian idealist and a hard headed, adroit, at times cunning politician (Bailyn).” As Wood says of the founders as a whole (in his review of Bailyn’s work), “All they could do is struggle with a multitude of problems, some of which they solved and some of which persist to this day.”
It has been said that history repeats itself, and that historians repeat each other. This week the historians have given us material definitely worth repeating. Their interpretations of the geopolitics of the period give us important lessons for today.