An interesting review of a book about the founders of America. Lord knows there is a huge amount of attention given to these people, often through a mythological filter (thus the deification of the by referring to them in capitals like “Founding Fathers”) in order to serve modern manifestations of fundamentalist nationalism, rather than through a sober historical one (which would better serve as a beacon of guidance for transcending and continuing the work, rather than simply trying to replicate and live in the world like it was still 1787).

Joseph J. Ellis has penned this book, “American Creation”, which puts some healthy new perspective on what the real value of the American story is to our current and future generations. The key point is in the way the original creators of this nation saw their work as only a step in a process, not a definitive declaration of the end all and be all of political wisdom. It helps to belie the absurdity of those who claim to be ‘originalists’ and who worship the constitution like it was holy writ, unchangeable and untouchable, contradicting the very nature and purpose of the political society the Revolution meant to establish in this country.

If at this point I were to note the familiar contradictions of the birth of the nation — chiefly the triumph of liberty, but only for propertied white men — and say that Ellis has written an entertaining account of, as his subtitle has it, the “triumphs and tragedies” of the founding, there would not be much new for me to say, or for you to read, either in this review or in Ellis’s book. It is difficult to imagine an educated American who does not know that the Revolution was selective and that the Revolutionaries, many of them slaveholders who were complicit in the bloodthirsty treatment of Indians, were flawed and imperfect.

But Ellis rescues his enterprise by going beyond the familiar critique of the founding to explore a point that remains underappreciated: that America was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them.

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For the new American Republic, Ellis writes, “government was not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated.”

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In a way, the fragmentary nature of the book mirrors one of Ellis’s key points. The past itself is fragmentary, and the fundamental task for any generation at any given moment is to bring order to intrinsically chaotic forces and events. History is messy because life is messy, and politics is provisional because life is provisional. Ellis shares the founders’ tragic sensibility, finding redemption in seeking the good rather than in achieving the perfect. The wisdom of the American founding lies in the recognition that the former is possible, and the latter is not.

“Unlike mathematics, in politics there was no agreed-upon solution reached by sheer brainpower and logic,” Ellis writes, “but rather an ongoing and never-ending struggle between contested versions of the truth.” Making it up as one goes along, then, is in the best tradition of the American Revolution.

As the decades passed and the founders died off, John Adams grew amused — in a John Adams kind of way — by the deification of the Revolutionary generation. “I ought not to object to your reverence for your fathers” he wrote an admiring younger correspondent, “but to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different periods, I have no reason to believe that we were better than you are.” Perhaps so, but what Adams’s generation did with its moment was to create the means by which subsequent generations, including our own, could argue about ends in a largely peaceable way. “It was patched and piebald then,” Adams said of the founding, “as it is now, ever was and ever will be, world without end.”

Read the complete text of this insightful review from The New York Times Here