The preeminent historian of the American Founding, Gordon Wood, died last week as the result of a traffic accident. Wood, a long-time professor at Brown University, had a profound and prolific effect upon the historiography of the American Revolution and the Founding in an academic career spanning six decades. Significantly, he was the first leading historian to emphasize the importance of republican thought and principles, both classical and modern, to 18th-century America, a tradition that later gave way to the totalizing force of equality and democratization.
Creation of the American Republic (1969), fashioned from Wood’s dissertation under the equally notable scholar Bernard Bailyn, looked to show the deep and radical transformation that occurred between the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution, a period in which the revolutionary idealism of 1776 came up against the considerations of practical politics. The result was a system of government which reflected a new philosophy and new definitions of democracy and republicanism. Republicanism itself was a utopian ideal, strikingly anticapitalistic in Wood’s vision, for early revolutionaries, according to which society and not just government would be reformed and made pure, with citizens working for the good of all and hierarchy and distinctions drawn away.
That idealistic spirit led to the crafting of state governments which, as Wood shows, were almost universally distinguished by weak executives and strong legislatures. The result was that the early revolutionaries, perhaps naive in political matters, quickly learned that the people’s representatives could be as despotic as the executive. The Constitution reflected these lessons, creating a separation of powers and checks and balances.
In the minds of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, among others, the social, political, and economic turmoil that resulted from the excessively democratic experiments at the state level showed that peace with England and at home could only be achieved with a restructured and empowered national government. The Imperial Crisis forced American leaders to formulate, out of their own experience but informed by English history and philosophy, a “Whig Science of Politics” to justify the revolution and the republican society it engendered. That project, Creation reminds us, was full of ambiguity and premised on the view that “the people” were a collection of interest groups with competing ambitions and motives.
Conservatives have broadly and understandably celebrated the life of a distinguished scholar who was personally courteous, gentlemanly, and gregarious. Yet, conservatives should also consider the myriad ways in which Wood rejected their vision of the American tradition. In the 1991 book Radicalism and the American Revolution, Wood painted a picture of an American Revolution that was not conservative, but radical. Even in Creation and its follow up, The Rising Glory of America (1971), Wood sees the American revolutionary leaders—he did not refer to them as “Founding Fathers” at this time—as cosmopolitan utopian reformers driven by the ideals of the Enlightenment. Winning the Revolution, in Wood’s telling, meant that the revolutionaries could purify their society of Britain’s conspiracy against liberty, and also redeem America against emergent social tensions driven by class division and growing individualism. In this period of Wood’s scholarship, the challenge to existing authority by equality everywhere, from religion to science to business and citizenship, was a disturbing and destructive force. By 1820, Wood writes,
America had become a sprawling, materialistic, and licentious popular democracy unlike anything that had ever existed before…This vast transformation, this move from classical republicanism to romantic democracy in a matter of decades, was the real American revolution, creating for many Americans a cultural crisis as severe as any in American history.
That is, Wood showed how the 18th-century world, built upon social distinction and the values of classical republicanism and its emphasis upon public virtue, had been lost within a generation. What it gave way to was a world built upon materialism and egalitarianism. The price of democracy, he admitted, was America’s “vulgarity, its materialism, its rootlessness, its anti-intellectualism.”
In his later works, Wood wrote more positively about the rise of liberalism and democratization throughout the 19th century. In Radicalism, Wood wrote, “The revolution did more than legally create the United States; it transformed society,” because Americans had “become, almost overnight, the most liberal, the most democratic, the most commercially minded, and the most modern people in the world.” Not only did the “ligaments of patronage and kinship that had held the old monarchical society together” atrophy, but they had to be replaced with a fully democratized culture based on merit and talent—common people with a common interest in making money. In Wood’s telling, the revolutionary generation was extraordinarily modern, optimistic, and forward-looking, and the revolutionaries were convinced they had the ability to shape society “as they saw fit.”
Ultimately, Wood’s bold and consistent emphasis was on the revolutionary nature of not just the American Revolution, but America itself. That is, as he put it in The Idea of America, Americans were an ideological people who had an “obsessive concern with our own morality and our messianic sense of purpose in the world.” The sense of nationhood and national purpose, in Wood’s rendering, came from the Revolution itself and the idea that we were a “special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty and democracy.”
Thus, Wood reads the Cold War period as an oxymoronic one in which the United States stood against revolutionary movements, even as the only adequate explanation for America’s tragic involvement in Vietnam, for example, was its own revolutionary and messianic tradition. Seeing things in this light, conservatives are compelled to try to understand how an American tradition as radical as the Jacobinite French Revolution can be conserved.
Just this year in National Review, looking to the 250th, Wood wrote as much, saying of the phrase “all men are created equal” that even the “French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789, with its statement that ‘men are born and remain free and equal in rights,’ does not have the same power and significance.’” No words, he thought, were “more radical, more momentous.” Indeed, they helped form the basis of “all modern thinking.”
Such an argument should, by its very nature, be jarring for conservatives. If Wood is right, then the meaning of conservatism in America is inherently paradoxical—it stands revealed as a movement dedicated to preserving a radical and universal revolution that destroyed all existing hierarchy, tradition, and status. Intentionally or not, Wood’s work gives credence to the neoconservative persuasion against the old conservative view of the Revolution as a conservative restoration of traditional rights and self-government.
Still, Wood’s own conservative disposition was of a different bent. He once quipped that “nothing really ever works out the way the perpetrators intend. I can’t think of any major event in the history of the world that ever turned out the way the participants who launched it expected.” Conservatives share this tragic view of history, given their understanding of human nature as fixed, and tend to sense that history should, if nothing else, humble us. We should follow Wood’s desire to take the people of the past on their own terms and worldview, including by reckoning with the complexities of the men who founded our nation.
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