Shocking internet searches, hagiographic biographies and inspiring teachers. All linked

Beware the internet search: it can sometimes shock and sadden.

And another fundamental truth: out and out partisanship for the subject can make for the most exciting teaching.

Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed “there is properly no history, only biography.” I’ve always been interested in history, so I’ve very properly turned my attention to biographies in recent years – reading them or listening to them, a great way to enhance such experiences as walking a dog, or even more fulfilling, washing floors.

My interest in American history (it’s good, because there isn’t too much of it) inevitably led me to consume biographies of such extraordinary figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. My sympathies have tended to be with the Jeffersonians, with their passionate commitment to democracy and human rights. My son Michael, on the other hand, has a soft spot for the man who became and remained their nemesis during his lifetime: Alexander Hamilton.

Eventually I felt that I really had to turn my attention a biography of Hamilton too, and chose one by Ron Chernow, who wrote so masterfully about Hamilton’s mentor, George Washington. I’m enjoying the imaginatively titled Alexander Hamilton.

How massively have I had to change my viewpoint. I knew, of course, that Jefferson and Madison (Washington too, as it happens) were slaveowners, but I was unaware that Hamilton, on the other hand, was a passionate abolitionist throughout his life. Who then, as Chernow asks, was truly committed to human rights?

It’s always good to have your presumptions challenged. On the other hand, there were times when I began to despair of Chernow’s tone. Jefferson and Madison, as well as being denounced as hypocrites, also come across as conniving, cowardly and backstabbing. This began to feel over the top, so I dug out my copy of Lynne Cheney’s James Madison, a life reconsidered, if only so I could contrast accounts of the same events from the two points of view. Cheney, of course, is as hagiographic towards her subject as Chernow is to his. In fact, I had to smile when I came across her description of Jefferson and Madison as “the two greatest minds of the eighteenth century.”

So we’re setting aside men such as Hamilton, are we? To say nothing of Newton, Locke, Leibniz or Voltaire among so many others?

It’s interesting how biographers tend to become partisans of their subjects. You don’t have to. My PhD thesis turned into Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis: an intellectual biography and I have to say, the more I found out about Maupertuis, the less I liked the man – prickly, self-aggrandising, paranoid and not above being a bully – so I felt no need to canonise him. Equally, I recently enjoyed A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent by Robert Merry, who doesn’t pull his punches concerning the faults of the eleventh US President (he was prickly, paranoid and not above being a bully, though perhaps less inclined to self-aggrandisement.)

Still, one has to admire teachers who become so enthusiastic about their subject that they identify personally with it. A man I greatly admired did just that in lectures about the French Renaissance writers, at what was then called Bedford College, University of London, which he allowed me to attend although I was a student at another college.

He gave a series of classes about Michel de Montaigne during which he gave marks of extreme humility. Most striking was his comment that he only felt qualified to teach the course by his profound sense of inadequacy to the task. Now, Montaigne wrote a series of pieces he called “Essays”, the first time the word was used for such writing – so he’s responsible for that bane of schoolchildren’s lives from his days to ours. But at his time, an “essay” was a trial, in the sense of a trying out – “these are the trials of my natural faculties” he says of his book. So everything he wrote was tentative. Indeed, I know of no author who used expressions equivalent to “on the other hand” more than he did.

Montaigne: the inventor of the essay
Ushering in centuries of pain for schoolkids everywhere

When the lecturer finished the classes on Montaigne, he switched his attention to the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard and introduced the subject by informing us that we should immediately forget everything we had ever read or heard about Ronsard, because everyone else had got him entirely wrong. Ronsard, as it happens, believed that no one had written anything that could be properly called French poetry before him. He saw himself as the greatest poet since Classical Antiquity, and probably superior to the Greeks and Romans too.

It was a privilege to be taught by a man who was so entirely adopted the personalities of his subjects.

It occurred to me that I ought to look him up to see what had become of him. I could only remember his first name, Malcolm. But google is unbeatable. “Malcolm Bedford Ronsard” immediately gave me a series of hits. Sadly, the first of these was a 1994 article from the Independent headlined Obituary: Professor Malcolm Smith.

Another giant of Renaissance studies, Professor Screech, had written the tribute. It ended:

His Oeuvres Complètes de La Boétie for the Editions de la Pléïade was submitted last December when he already knew that his cancer was terminal.

His edition of Du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome with Edmund Spenser's Ruines of Rome was printed and bound in America days before he died.

He’d died at only 53. But right to the end he’d maintained his fiery enthusiasm for his subject. The enthusiasm that I’d found so inspirational when he taught me.

In all likelihood, you wouldn’t remember me, Professor Smith, if you were still around. But I remember you, with admiration undimmed. Thanks for all you did. And thanks for the passion you communicated in doing it.

Greek debt: parallels and contrasts with the US

Greeks who remember the German occupation, according to the BBC, are now talking about another invasion by Germany without a shot being fired.

Greece will, it seems, stay in the Euro. At least for the moment. It will do so at the cost of measures that apparently represent more severe austerity than the terms rejected by Greeks in a referendum just over a week ago. It feels like Greek voters have lost, but German politicians – apparently the fiercest critics of Greece and the harshest in their demands of them – have won.

Merkel may have avoided this destiny so far
But certainly not be being gentle with Greece

This reminds me of how the United States dealt with a similar crisis, when it faced debt problems not unlike those of Greece within the Eurozone.

The original constitution of the United States was deeply unsatisfactory, giving almost no power – certainly no power to raise funds – to the national government, and leaving most authority in the hands of the States. It became increasingly clear over just a few years that the situation was untenable and something with a more serious Federal government at its centre would have to be set up.

A Convention met and drew up the Constitution of the United States that we know today (though at that stage without any amendments, of course). George Washington became the first President and, among an all-star cast of Ministers, he appointed Alexander Hamilton as his Secretary of the Treasury (Minister of Finance).

Now there’s little on which I agree with Hamilton, particularly his views of popular sovereignty, but that’s for another debate. On finance, he was something of a wizard. And one of his first major measures concerned what came to be known as Assumption – not a religious moment, except for those whose God in Mammon, but the initiative by which the Federal government would take over the debts incurred by the individual States in fighting the War of Independence.

That was great news for Massachusetts and South Carolina, which were saddled with heavy debts (viz Greece) but not so good for Virginia and North Carolina which had cleared most of theirs, and didn’t appreciate having to pick up the tabs for the others (viz Germany). There was a battle royal. James Madison, destined to become the Republic’s fourth president, was a Congressman at the time and led the campaign against Assumption. He defeated the proposal.

The story has it that Alexander Hamilton met Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State but destined to be the third President, in the street outside Jefferson’s house. He was distraught and Jefferson invited him in. Hamilton explained that without Assumption, certain States would be driven towards bankruptcy, and also the Federal government would be shown to be powerless to face up to dealing with a financial crisis (viz the Eurozone).

What’s more, Hamilton maintained the apparently paradoxical view that the Federal government would be accepting a “national blessing” by taking on the debt: it would oblige it to collect taxes and establish it as creditworthy (viz the Eurozone again).

Jefferson was a close ally of Madison’s and increasingly an opponent of Hamilton’s. But he allowed his then-colleague to convince him, and took it on himself to win Madison round.

The two allies came up with a compromise solution: Madison would not block the question of Assumption coming up again in Congress; he would vote no, but would not speak against the proposal. That’s what happened, and Assumption was adopted, over the silent opposition of Madison.

At the time, the US had a population of under 4 million. Even the UK had 8 million, and France 20 million. GDP was around $200 million, corresponding to about $4.5 billion today – when US GDP is about $17.7 trillion. The US was, in other words, a minor sideshow in geopolitics back then; today it is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth.

There is no need for Europe to aspire to that status. European nations have been massive global players in the past, and places like Amritsar or Algiers testify to how badly that went. But it strikes me that Europe needs to get its act together if it is only to defend its status in a world increasingly dominated by huge nations, such as the US, China and Russia.

The success of the US wasn’t naturally entirely down to acceptance of Hamilton’s proposals on handling debt. But they certainly contributed: they set up the notion of the Union has owing a duty to all its components, and therefore being more powerful than any of them, capable of playing a full role on the world stage.

So the US passed its test over Assumption.

I’m not sure the Eurozone has done anything like so well over Greek debt.

At the brink of the Fiscal Cliff

So the US House of Representatives went to the brink of the fiscal cliff, peered over and wisely decided this was not the moment for a great step forward. 

Averting disaster by compromise only became possible because, for a brief moment at least, its opponents were able to wear down the stubborn resistance of a group viscerally opposed to any tax increase, the Tea Party. It draws its name from the insurgents who, rather than pay the tax Britain had imposed on tea, dressed as Indians and invaded three ships in Boston in 1773 to empty the chests they contained into the harbour. Their action came to be known as the Boston Tea Party.

The modern Tea Party supporters see themselves as heirs of those rebels. The claim only shows how little they understand the history to which they appeal.

The reality is that they are the heirs of the other side in that dispute. It wasn’t between tax-loving Britain and tax-hating Americans: on the contrary, the Brits hated tax at least as much as the colonists. The problem was that they had wracked up huge debts, not least in fighting successful but massively expensive imperial wars; like most people who are keen on military spending, such as the modern-day Tea Party, they wanted their cake and they wanted to eat it, to enjoy the fruits of war without paying the taxes they entailed. So they came up with this brilliant wheeze of getting the Americans to pay instead.

Backfired, of course. Within ten years Britain had been forced to recognise US independence. In trying to dodge its own fiscal responsibilities, the British government had lost a prized possession. If only the Tea Party had enough sense of history it might see that it’s running the same risk – of cutting off its own nose, and that of most of its compatriots at the same time – if it doesn’t learn that sometimes you need to be ready to pay for things.

It’s not as though no-one can see that. Even within the Republican Party, people are beginning to speak out. I’m indebted to a Facebook friend who shared this comment of Jon Huntsman, briefly a candidate for the Republican nomination for president at the last election: ‘In my party, compromise cannot be seen as analogous to treason, which it has been recently.’

Jon Huntsman: closer to the spirit of the founding fathers...

Absolutely right. Again, if the Tea Party knew anything about its own country’s history, it would appreciate its tradition of seeking compromise. As early as in 1790, within a year of the formation of first George Washington administration, there was a dispute over the public finances and taxation.

At stake was whether the Federal government should take over – ‘assume’ – the debts of the states, as promoted by the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, to establish the credit of the new nation on a more stable footing. A number of States had cleared much of their debt, notably Virginia and all the other Southern States apart from South Carolina. Why, they argued, should they be funding the debts of the feckless North East?

Leading the counter-attack against Hamilton was James Madison, a Virginian and leading ally of Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State, also from Virginia. As a result of Madison’s tireless campaigning, the Hamilton plan was stalled twice in Congress.

Shades of today? You bet. The parallels are extraordinary.

But here’s where the two stories diverge. Appealed to by Hamilton, Jefferson didn’t simply indulge the knee-jerk instinct to side with his ally Madison. Instead he hosted a dinner for the two men. Over that table, Hamilton and Madison worked out the details of one of the first great compromises of US history: Madison would not support the Hamilton bill in Congress, but he would stop organising against assumption of debt; in return, Hamilton would agree to shifting the national capital from its temporary home in New York, not to one of the great commercial centres of the North East, but to a patch of land on the Maryland-Virginia border, where it stands today; in addition, Virginia would be offered a deal on its remaining debts to sweeten the pill.

Jefferson, and then Madison, had subordinated their narrow sectional interests to the needs of society as a whole.

Compromises by their nature satisfy no-one. They’re messy and unappealing. But, wow, they’re preferable to national bankruptcy. Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton understood that.

Jon Huntsman understands that.

What’s with the Tea Party that stops them understanding it? Do they really think that politics is all about dressing up as Indian warriors, breaking into ships and throwing tea into a harbour? Will they learn that it sometimes requires statesmanship too?

Newtown: the long view

A people fighting for its freedom: what could be more inspiring? Even we know that even in victory, they are only swapping one set of problems for another, that what they conquer may be new liberties but it won’t be Liberty, that the process won’t be complete but simply reach a stage from which the next can be contemplated. 

Along the way, as the process extends, there are many diversions, as early principles are deformed and misapplied by those who follow behind. Still, the original leaders remain impressive and, to me, among the most striking are those craftsmen, lawyers and farmers who mounted the campaign to free the North American colonies of British domination back in the eighteenth century.

At the time there was only one standing army in the colonies, a foreign one, Britain’s. The insurgents could only call on the militias of the individual colonies, and arm them only with whatever weapons they had in their homes. Britain, of course, banned the colonists from holding arms, making acquiring and keeping weaponry a key issue.

In 1791, with the British expelled, the newly formed United States decided to add to their Constitution ten amendments that would form a Bill of Rights. There was nothing new about this demand. It had been raised by Englishmen since the reign of Charles I in the early seventeenth century, and we tend to forget that it was above all Englishmen who set up the United States.

Curiously, the English back in England had to wait for a written Bill of Rights until 2000, when the Human Rights Act came into force. Ironically, there’s now an intensifying campaign in Britain to repeal it as ‘too European’, i.e. foreign. The notion of guaranteed rights has never really fully taken root in Britain.

When the American founding fathers came to draw up their Bill of Rights, their views were naturally influenced by the circumstances in which they lived and the experiences of their political careers. And a matter that concerned them, though by then the United States had its own standing army, was the difficulty of forming an effective, well-armed militia.

So they included a second amendment among the ten adopted in 1791:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

It’s always difficult to try to work out exactly what was intended by men long since dead. But surely both the wording of the amendment and the personal histories of the men who drafted it, suggest it was designed to ensure that the people could defend the state against anyone attempting to use violence against it.

Possibly, as the US Supreme Court argued in 2008 and 2010, this could be extended to include defending one’s own home and family.

What it was clearly not designed to do was to create circumstances in which it is easy for deeply unfortunate, unhappy or ill individuals to walk into a high school, a college campus, a temple, a cinema or – for Pete’s sake – a primary school and deal out arbitrary death.

Surely the framers of the amendment would be the first to cry in horror at the idea that they intended to allow citizens to hold lethal weapons for any purpose they chose, independent of the defence of the state?

James Madison, father of the Constitution.
He would be shocked by the travesty made
of the Second Amendment

It’s my suspicion that if James Madison, the father of the Constitution and fourth President of the United States, were to return to Earth today and see what happened in Newtown, Connecticut, yesterday he might say, ‘what? And they turn our second amendment into a defence of a situation in which this can happen? It’s time to revise it.’

But we don’t need the resurrection of James Madison for Americans to understand the need for revision. An American friend, talking about what pushes anyone to acts of mindless violence, wrote yesterday ‘sometimes it is mental illness, sometimes it is being fired, sometimes it is heartbreak, sometimes it is hate...but the common denominator is always access to a gun, and without the gun there would be no killing.’

One of those attending the vigil in Washington pointed out a stark truth: ‘assault weapons are designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. They have no place in our society, they have no place in our communities.’

I’d love to think that the cumulative effect of the repeated massacres would lead to an unstoppable momentum for change. Perhaps it will at last. But the forces against are powerful and well-organised. 

Among the many statements of sorrow yesterday, there were also eloquent silences. John Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives, offered condolences but said nothing about gun control. And the great pro-gun lobby, the NRA, followed its usual tactic of saying little while the wounds are fresh, saving its powder for any proposals that emerge, which it will use its financial strength to derail.

There’s a long way to go to achieve gun control in the US. But the Founding Fathers didn’t give up because the forces against them were apparently overwhelming or the battle was likely to be long. And, as I said at the beginning, no revolution is ever complete, it’s always a work in progress.

What better tribute could there be to the drafters of the Constitution than to take that process forward, campaigning for as long as it takes, to modify one of the provisions they added to it? To review a second amendment perverted by misinterpretation and bring it back in line with the spirit that they embodied?

Then perhaps we can turn the Auroras, the Columbines, the Newtowns into what they should be: ghastly reminders of a past long buried.

Why not put a stop to this terror?