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With these character sketches of key figures of the American Revolution and illuminating probes of its circumstances, Bernard Bailyn reveals the ambiguities, complexities, and uncertainties of the founding generation as well as their achievements.
Using visual documentation—portraits, architecture, allegorical engravings—as well as written sources, Bailyn, one of our most esteemed historians, paints a complex picture of that distant but still remarkably relevant world. He explores the powerfully creative effects of the Founders’ provincialism and lays out in fine detail the mingling of gleaming utopianism and tough political pragmatism in Thomas Jefferson’s public career, and the effect that ambiguity had on his politics, political thought, and present reputation. And Benjamin Franklin emerges as a figure as cunning in his management of foreign affairs and of his visual image as he was amiable, relaxed, and amusing in his social life.
Bailyn shows, too, why it is that the Federalist papers—polemical documents thrown together frantically, helter-skelter, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in a fierce political battle two hundred years ago—have attained canonical status, not only as a penetrating analysis of the American Constitution but as a timeless commentary on the nature of politics and constitutionalism.
Professor Bailyn concludes, in a wider perspective, with an effort to locate the effect of the Founders’ imaginative thought on political reformers throughout the Atlantic world. Precisely how their principles were received abroad, Bailyn writes, is as ambiguous as the personalities of the remarkably creative pro-
vincials who founded the American nation.
- Sales Rank: #821124 in Books
- Published on: 2003-01-07
- Released on: 2003-01-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.54" h x .86" w x 6.50" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 208 pages
From Publishers Weekly
While the five essays in this slim volume neither pack the stylistic wallop nor make the powerful contributions to knowledge of so many of the author's previous works, they are vintage Bailyn. The two-time Pulitzer-winning historian's focus is the creative imagination applied to statecraft. His subjects are the nation's founders, whom he believes to be idealists as much as realists. As usual, Bailyn's ebullient if nuanced admiration for the Framers carries the reader along. Characteristically, he emphasizes how the Framers' provincialism allowed them to spring free of European modes of thought to create something genuinely new. Bailyn (Voyagers to the West, etc.) brilliantly uses pictures to reveal the different aspirations and bearing of the British and founding gentry. A superb chapter also uses iconography to demonstrate how Benjamin Franklin took an active hand in fashioning and altering his own likeness in paintings and medals and then used them to create crucial sympathy in France for the American cause. Of all the "tempered idealists" he deals with, none tangles Bailyn up, as he does just about everyone else, like Thomas Jefferson. But essays on the Federalist Papers and the complex, paradoxical, ever-changing reception of American constitutionalism abroad rescue the work from momentary confusion. One comes away with a rounded appreciation of the founders' limitations, failures and moral failings as well as their extraordinary achievements. 65 b&w, 4 pages color illus.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
A Pulitzer Prize winner twice over, historian Bailyn offers character sketches of the Founding Fathers.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Eminent historian Bailyn analyzes different aspects of the American Revolution in these essays, which are thematically framed as explorations of the contradictions between the actions and the words of some of the Founding Fathers. Jefferson's reputation has, of course, wildly gyrated, and it is currently at a nadir. Bailyn doesn't restore the sage, zinging him for slaveholding, but he writes with nuance about Jefferson's radical ideals about human liberty, which, if not honored personally, have nevertheless proven lasting in the abstract. Another ambiguity Bailyn focuses on is foreign policy, specifically, how the Founders detested power politics but found it necessary to play the game in the alliance with France. Franklin's diplomacy in Paris provides the author's focus for this conflict between realism and idealism, with interesting digressions into the imagery of Franklin. Although the book is slightly academic, the dozens of illustrations and Bailyn's reputation as a Pulitzer winner (Voyagers to the West, 1987) will draw history readers. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
He discusses comparisons of portraits and great homes and shows how they reflect the American aristocratic ...
By Lawrence Roberts
Bailyn is one of the preeminent scholars of the Revolutionary era. He believes in the idea of "American exceptionalism", but does not use that term explicitly. He also does not present it in the sense it is often used today - as a synonym for American superiority. He discusses comparisons of portraits and great homes and shows how they reflect the American aristocratic departure from European aristocracy. This, he believes, reflects the American founders constant questioning and probing of European political theory, which eventually led not only to the Revolution, but the establishment of a then unique Republic through the Constitution. His chapter on Jefferson (the Ambiguities of Freedom) exemplifies the intersection of political theory and reality in the founding of the US. He could not have chosen a better founder to exemplify it than Jefferson. Jefferson (other than Thomas Paine) was the most purely idealistic of the founders, and yet his Presidency and positions he took in his later life contradict some of his idealism. Jefferson's views on free trade, freedom of the press, and the evils of a national bank, substantially contradict many of his pragmatic decisions in these areas as President. Bailyn shows in one short chapter how, as conflicted as Jefferson seemed to be in his actions versus his ideals, his idealistic core and his optimism for the ultimate realization of the full promise of the Revolution remained with him throughout his life. Bailyn, in this book and especially in his classic "Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" focuses on the complexity of the American Revolution and of the social, religious, political, and demographic forces that were occurring in the Revolutionary and Founding era and how they contributed both to events in America. This book, while being quite profound in showing the intricate interconnection of these trends, is very readable. In only 149 pages he packs in an enormous amount of information and astute analysis. I highly recommend it. His students, particularly Gordon S. Wood, Michael Kammen, Jack Rakove have written excellent histories. Other students of his that I have read and whose works I can recommend are Richard Brown and Pauline Maier.
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
A Holograph of Cultural Complexity
By Robert Morris
Historical research of the highest quality is frequently driven by a determination to answer questions of compelling importance. That is especially true of this volume in which Bailyn offers five separate but related essays which, together, examine a theme which its subtitle suggests: the nature and significance of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders." In his Preface, Bailyn identifies two convictions which remain constant throughout all five chapters: that those founders were "truly creative people, and that their creative efforts, the generation-long enterprise that elevated these obscure people from their marginal world to the center of Western civilization, were full of inconsistencies, logical dilemmas, and unresolved problems."
With regard to questions of compelling importance, several can be summarized as follows:
1. Which ambiguities "beset" Jefferson's career? What were their nature and impact?
2. What is revealed by the "strange interplay between lofty idealism and cunning realism in Franklin's spectacular success in Paris"? Meanwhile, what can be learned from the interplay between Franklin and Adams?
3. What is the significance of the fact that the authors of the Federalist papers struggled to reconcile "the need for a powerful, coercive public authority with the preservation of the private liberties for which the Revolution had been fought"? To what extent was such a reconciliation achieved?
These are indeed compelling questions, ones which probably need to be asked today as our nation struggles to decide what its appropriate role is in the global community. After I read this book but before I began to formulate this review, I read Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents. In it, Stiglitz offers a heartfelt but rigorous examination of globalization, "the removal of barriers to free trade and the closer integration of national economies," asserting that it can and should be a force for good "and that it has the potential [in italics] to enrich everyone in the world, particularly the poor." However, given how globalization has been managed thus far, it should be rethought. Focusing primarily on the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) during the past decade, Stiglitz responds to the basic question: "Why has globalization -- a force that has brought so much good -- become so controversial?"
I had Stiglitz's book in mind as I re-read Bailyn's. Granted, no one knew in the late-eighteenth century that the coalition of thirteen colonies (if it achieved independence) would one day become the single most powerful nation in the world. For me, the single greatest benefit of Bailyn's is his analysis of the nature and significance of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders," how they created a foundation on which the original thirteen colonies evolved over more than two centuries into the 50 states and their federal government which now, during arguably the most volatile period since the 1770s, struggles to the support the natural rights of humanity by advocating and supporting what Jefferson once referred to as "the sacred fire of freedom and self-government" throughout the world. Challenges of various kinds will, of course, continue to present themselves. Bailyn duly acknowledges that reality while suggesting that "I think an equally important challenge is our own responsibility to probe the character of our constitutional establishment, as the eighteenth century provincials probed the establishment they faced, to recognize that for many in our own time and within our own culture, it has become scholastic in nits elaboration, self-absorbed, self-centered, and in significant ways distant from the ordinary facts of life."
Bailyn's brilliant examination of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders" is in essence an examination of the heritage of those founders, revealing the humanity of their talents and imperfections, to be sure, but also suggesting the standards of measurement by which we determine the extent to which we have proven worthy of that heritage.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Every American should read this book
By Wishful Thinker
This book should be a must read for every high school American history student.
This very short book has more information in it about the founding of the United States than all the other books I have read while studying and reading about American history over the decades. Thank you Bernard Bailyn. If you don't have an appreciation for the risk the country's founders took, have no idea how clever a diplomate Ben Franklin was, have never read any of the anti-federalist papers, this book will introduce you to all of this in various chapters. But the thinking behind Bailyn's theory of what allowed these men to create a totally new form of government is even more fascinating. It was an amazing time with an amazing group of imperfect, but thinking men -- men who could think beyond conventional wisdom and who, fortunately, were around to carry the country forward for close to a half century.
I can't remember if Bailyn touched on this but Jackson was the first president not involved with the country's founding. When I thought of the changes that occured beginning with his presidency, I stopped for a moment and thanked the founding fathers for what they did and for staying around to direct the country for near a half century.
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