The Federalist Papers set out the weaknesses of the Articles, point up the need for a strong national government, systematically defend the Constitution’s various provisions and tackle the arguments against it. They make appeals to historical precedent, invoke philosophers from Plato to Montesquieu, and employ every rhetorical device, freely resorting to analogy and metaphor when logic and fact fail.
At one point, Madison tries to make us sympathize with the formidable difficulties the framers faced in simply marking off the line between the state and federal roles. So he likens their task to that faced by, of all people, naturalists—whose attempts to mark off the various forms of animals and vegetable life are likewise fraught with difficulty.
It’s a commonplace today to declare our leaders not of the intellectual stature of those of yore. Nostalgia-fogged sentiment? Maybe so, but one need go no further than The Federalist Papers to sympathize with the assertion. The most able of our time turn to science, business, or the arts—much less so to politics. Who today boasts the insight into human nature, the sheer force of intellect, that Hamilton and Madison reveal in these essays?
The Constitution that has so successfully piloted the country through wars, insurrections, attacks on its legitimacy, and various crises of corruption was, The Federalist Papers remind us, thought out beforehand. The framers anticipated problems, foresaw human excesses and moral shortcomings. They carefully, deliberately built in that intricate system of controls that generations of Civics I students have learned to parrot back as “checks-and-balances.”
If our government was designed, the Constitution was its blueprint. But unlike a bridge or other engineering structure, which need cope only with predictable forces and known stresses, our republic was designed to withstand largely unpredictable forces induced by human passions, needs and drives.
It is not too much to linger on this technical analogy. The American Revolution, after all, was a product of the Enlightenment, that 18th century intellectual movement that saw reason as the one sure route to human betterment. The Federalist Papers pulse with its spirit. The political means the new Constitution would employ, Hamilton writes, were “wholly new discoveries,” the consequence of a much advanced “science of politics.” To him, representative government, checks and balances and all the rest had been proven out through historical experiment.
Government’s task was nothing less than to transcend human nature. Human beings, the authors say on every page, are quick to anger, slow to think; they segregate into factions, try to gather power to themselves, deny it to others. “So strong is the propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities,” writes Hamilton, “that where no substantial occasion presents itself the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.” Property holders contend with the propertyless, farmers with manufacturers. “The passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint,” he goes on. Little is to be gained by imagining they will; better to design around the human material.
So it’s no accident we have a government that’s so ably weathered crises, panics, wars and other expressions of human folly; it was designed that way.
The Annals of Imperial Rome
____________
By Tacitus
First appeared circa 100 A.D.
When Christ was born, Augustus ruled the Roman Empire. After a 45- year reign, he died, and power passed to the morose and cunning Tiberius, his adopted son; 23 years later to mad, murderous Caligula; then to the seemingly weak-minded Claudius; and then to Nero—who may not have fiddled while Rome burned but rather sung. While Roman legions subdued tribal revolts in Germany, Britain and throughout the Mediterranean, the capital was engulfed in political turmoil, intrigue, sexual excess, and murders performed by every means men and women could conceive.
From a perch removed by half a century from all the madness, cruelty and blood, Tacitus chronicled the history of this crucial period, one that helped sow the seeds of modern Europe. His account comes down to us (after a 1,400-year period before the Renaissance, when it went largely ignored) as The Annals of Imperial Rome. Originally covering the years 14 to 68, the surviving “Annals” contain gaps, most notably the brief but bloody reign of Caligula.
Tacitus chronicled the lives and fortunes of his highborn subjects, but also commented upon them with relish and bite. As one critic has observed, “Even the most inept and donnish translators have never been able to erase it.” The Senate’s noisy mourning for Tiberius’ son Drusus, writes Tacitus, was “insincere and unconvincing.” Charges brought against a certain official were downright “preposterous.”
This is no faceless history by a recorder bound to canons of strict, pseudoscientific objectivity. Tacitus himself is always right there, launching into digressions, commenting upon this conspirator’s character flaws, that emperor’s hidden motivations. Not that he imposes his own reading on events; indeed, in several instances, he takes care to offer variant interpretations. But he’s not inclined, either, to let a choice incident go without comment when he can just as well pass judgment with a sneer.
Sometimes just such a biting writerly presence is needed to relieve the tedium of plots, poisonings, suicides and miscellaneous bloodlettings—a tedium of which Tacitus himself is aware. At one point, contrasting his own history with those of an earlier, more illustrious span of Rome’s past, he admits: “My themes... concern cruel orders, unremitting accusations, treacherous friendships, innocent men ruined—a conspicuously monotonous glut of downfalls and their monotonous causes.” And the sheer, unrelenting human baseness he reveals does sometimes pall; one yearns for a hero to stand up for what he believes, and to worry about someone’s skin besides his own.
How much does all this grim business simply reflect the times (perhaps, as Tacitus writes, a sign of “heaven’s anger with Rome”)? How much owes to Tacitus’ sneering stance? And more, an English-speaking reader is apt to wonder, how much is an artifact of translation? The style of Tacitus’ Latin, after all, has been described as “idiosyncratic,” and “the despair of the translator.”
One translator, Michael Grant, gives this reading of Tacitus: It was the final days of Claudius’ reign and “Agrippina had long decided on murder. Now she saw her opportunity. Her agents were ready. But she needed advice about poisons.” In a prefatory note to his translation, Grant observes that the best way to render Tacitus into English is through “as pungent a simplicity as the translator can achieve.”
Compare Grant’s with this other translation of the same passage: “It was then that Agrippina, long since bent upon the impious deed, and eagerly seizing the present occasion, well-furnished as she was with wicked agents, deliberated upon the nature of the poison she would use.” Pungent simplicity it lacks. And yet, though mired in polysyllables, it bears some of the same acerbity as Grant’s.
That is Tacitus. And something in the Imperial Rome of the First Century brought it out in him.
The Peloponnesian War
____________
By Thucydides
Written circa 404 B.C.
The time: the 5th century B.C., soon after the outbreak of the long, bloody conflict between Athens and Sparta known today as the Peloponnesian War. Athens, at the height of its power and influence, is burying its war dead. Following custom, their bones have been returned to the city, and Pericles, Athens’ gifted leader, has been asked to address the mourners. In a rhetorical master-stroke, he barely mentions the dead. Instead—and with an eye toward future battles as much as past—he praises the city for which they fell.
Our Athens, he says, is a democracy, its form of government a model to others. In it, power goes to the capable, not the well-connected, and poverty is no bar to public service. Our people are tolerant of others, yet respectful of the law, which “commands our deep respect.”
But not all is seriousness. “When our work is over, we are
in a position to enjoy all kinds of recreations for our spirits... In our homes we bind a beauty and good taste which delight us every day and which drive away our cares.”
Lest this seem self-indulgent, he goes on, “our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about... “
On and on goes this litany of Athenian virtue. Delivered ostensibly in praise of the dead, Pericles’ funeral oration is actually civics lesson, patriotic appeal, moralistic entreaty and call to arms all in one. “This,” concludes Pericles, “is the kind of city for which these men, who could not bear the thought of losing her, nobly fought and nobly died.” This, he reminds them, is what they must defend.
Whether Pericles, who died two years later in the plague that devastated Athens, said every word attributed to him is unclear. In form, Thucydides’ history of the war is a straightforward account of battles and troop movements punctuated by the texts of speeches marking decisive moments in the conflict: Should the Plateans be put to death for failing to aid Sparta? Do the Mytilenians, who have revolted against Athens, deserve Spartan support? Yet Thucydides confesses that neither he nor his informants always recalled the precise wording of key speeches. And so, he explains, “while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used,” he has endeavored “to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.”
Contradictory? Perhaps. But except in the most narrowly literal sense, it hardly matters. These ideas and sentiments plainly could have been expressed. Whether Thucydides expressed them—or Pericles or Alcibiades or Cleaon— they suggest what the Greeks thought worth saying. Their logic is, mostly, compelling. They are laced with appeals to human nature, self-interest, and common sense.
Perhaps three-quarters of the book records the movements of soldiers and ships, battlefield geography, the numbers and arms of opposing forces, the ebb and flow of battle, who died, who didn’t, what revenge was exacted on the losers, and so on. Even in this day of laser-guided missiles, generals will draw lessons. Those of unmilitary bent, meanwhile, will find these accounts appealing to the imagination as human drama, and to the intellect as puzzles: How can we dislodge the Spartans from that rocky island at Pylos?
During a break in the siege of Pylos, Spartan emissaries go to Athens and appeal for peace. Don’t be greedy, they say. You have the upper hand now, but who knows how things will go? Let’s put our mutual enmity behind us; do not impose terms too vengeful. For “no lasting settlement can be made in a spirit of revenge, when one side gets the better of things in war and forces its opponent to swear to carry out the terms of an unequal treaty.” Those who imposed on Germany the harsh Treaty of Versailles which ended the First World War but planted the seeds of the Second, plainly never read their Thucydides.
During a revolution, Thucydides observes, words lose their meaning. “What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member... Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man... Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.”
Is this Corcyra in the wake of its civil war in 427 B.C.? Or France during the Reign of Terror of 1793? Or even America, wracked by the spasms of terrorist violence, today?
Democracy in America
____________
By Alexis de Tocqueville
Originally published in 1835
What gifts of perception and intellect equip one to meet a callow teenager and predict his personality, quirks and all, as an old man? Whatever they are, Alexis de Tocqueville had them. The “teenager” was America of the early 1830s, when Thomas Jefferson was dead barely five years. America today, a century and a half older, its arteries clogged with the detritus of history, can only marvel at the precision of Tocqueville’s insights.
The son of a French aristocrat, Tocqueville came to America in 1831, stayed nine months, traveled 7,000 miles. His ostensible purpose? To study the American penal system. In fact, nothing about America, its institutions or its people, escaped his fresh eye and penetrating intelligence. He returned to France in the late winter of 1832, and soon set to work on what would be his enduring classic, Democracy in America, published in two volumes, in 1835 and 1840. To this day no book about the American national character is so often, and so profitably, quoted.
America is something new, says Toqueville—the most advanced expression of a universal and irresistible human urge to break down the old feudalism and all its rigid class distinctions. “I saw in America more than America,” he tells his readers in an introduction. “It was the shape of democracy itself which I sought, its inclinations, character, prejudices and passions; I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we [in Europe] have to fear or hope.”
He is not American democracy’s unalloyed admirer. There is, first of all, the maddening mediocrity that seems to flourish on our shores. And a lowering of the level of intellectual debate to that below what a Parisian could expect in any sidewalk cafe. And a “tyranny of the majority” that leaves little room for originality of either thought or opinion.
But overshadowing these defects are, among other things, American respect for laws; American democracy’s tendency toward slow, peaceful change; the difficulty faced by evil-doers in controlling enough levers of power to do harm; and a narrowing of extremes of wealth.
Though disquisitions on lawmaking and other such textbook staples occupy their share of it, Democracy in America will interest not only students of history and government; virtually every aspect of the American national character swings into focus under Tocqueville’s microscope, from race relations, to the family, to religion, to manners, to the arts.
Occasionally, as when he sees Americans as little more than transplanted Englishmen (without benefit of immigrant cross-fertilization), or when he pictures Americans as unlikely to make major advances in theoretical science, he is revealed as merely human. For an instant, the reader may actually feel miffed, only to abruptly realize he’s so disappointed Tocqueville is wrong only because Tocqueville is right so astoundingly.
Tocqueville describes Americans as people whose lives are “so practical, so confused, so excited, so active, that little time remains for them for thought.”
He says of democratic institutions that they “awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never satisfy.” He could be describing Edison as well as the Apollo Moon Project when he says that “in America, the purely practical side of science is cultivated admirably... The Americans always display a clear, free, original and creative turn of mind.”
Tocqueville even anticipates mass production. In a democracy, the people’s desire for goods “outrun[s] their means and [they] will gladly agree to put up with an imperfect substitute rather than do without the object of their desire altogether...” One solution “is to find better, quicker, more skillful ways of making it. The second is to make a great number of objects which are more or less the same but not so good... “
It would be the best part of a century before the first Model T came rolling off Henry Ford’s assembly line.
IV
Making Hard Work Easy:
the Great Popularizers
Only Yesterday — Frederick Lewis Allen
Microbe Hunters — Paul de Kruif
Selected Works — Cicero
Coming of Age in Samoa — Margaret Mead
The Outermost House — Henry Beston
The Amiable Baltimoreans — Francis F. Beirne
What to Listen for in Music — Aaron Copland
Gods, Graves, and Scholars — C. W. Ceram
The Stress of Life — Hans Selye
The Greek Way — Edith Hamilton
_________________________________
To some, “popularization” verges
on a dirty word. A recent cartoon shows one elderly scholar saying to another, “At least, we haven’t stooped to popularizing.” Even when not condemned outright, popularization normally carries little cachet, is rarely seen as a nonfiction genre in the way that science fiction, say, ranks as a distinct, if lesser, fictional one.
But it takes talent to bring an inchoate mass of arcane material to life. A new generation of writers has made “popular science” something like its own genre. But not only science benefits from the popularizing impulse; so do history, anthropology, music. And as we see here, some of the best examples of it long predate the current crop.
Only Yesterday
An Informal History of the 1920s
____________
By Frederick Lewis Allen
First published in 1931
On October. 24, 1929, in the offices of J. P. Morgan & Company, reporters eagerly awaited the words of Thomas W. Lamont, a representative of the mighty financial house. Lamont looked grave. “There has been,” he said, “a little distress selling on the Stock Exchange.”
October 24 was the first panicky selling day of the Crash of ‘29. In the first two hours of trading, United States Steel dropped 12 dollars a share. Montgomery Ward plummeted from 83 to 50. Dozens of stocks lost all they had gained in the preceding months of the bull market.
That was Thursday. Monday brought even more precipitous declines. Then came Black Tuesday, when the bottom dropped out of the market altogether and panic reached its heights: With a scream of financial agony the Roaring Twenties were over.
Today our image of the tumultuous Twenties is apt to be colored by nostalgia, distorted by TV and movies, or simply dimmed by ignorance. To us it was the heyday of our parents or grandparents’ generation. In 1931, on the other hand, when Frederick Lewis Allen wrote his “informal history” of the decade, the Twenties were still “only yesterday.”
Vintage Reading Page 8