Excerpts from a NY times book review today of an American history of weapons of yokel seduction:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/books/review/16BROOKHT.html 'To Begin the World Anew': The Founding Yokels By RICHARD BROOKHISER Of the storms of fashion that have pounded the humanities during the last 30 years have spared the study of early American history, one of the scholars we have most to thank is Bernard Bailyn. Bailyn's 1967 classic, "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution," kept the eyes of a generation of historians on the subjects that early Americans themselves eyed so obsessively: the ideas and the politics of a highly intellectual and political time. There were battles to be fought and money to be made during the American Revolution, and without victory in the first, or the lure of the second, the Revolution would never have been won. But the thoughts of even soldiers and speculators kept returning to politics, and to the ideals that they believed politicians lived to defend, or to threaten. Bailyn made the founders comprehensible, and lively -- for their ideas still march through our minds. The essay on Jefferson is the slightest. Bailyn draws attention to the ambiguities in his thought -- his glimpse of "what a wholly enlightened world might be" versus the compromises he made as a politician and an administrator to advance his agenda of the day. Basically, though, the essay is hero worship -- Ken Burns, one more time. This will no longer do. Jefferson's reputation has been taking on water at an alarming rate, from the twin leaks of Sally Hemings and the larger question of slavery. Federalist sympathizers, disgusted with his coldness, his cant and his many deceptions, may be tempted to view Jefferson's posthumous troubles with glee. But if Americans commit parricide on him, they commit suicide. Jefferson must be defended by those who love him toughly -- who know him well enough to dislike him, but who know themselves well enough to know what they owe him. In the misleadingly titled "Realism and Idealism in American Diplomacy," Bailyn hits top form. The real subject is the protean genius of Benjamin Franklin at recreating himself and his image. We meet the shape-shifter in his first portrait, painted when he was 40, as a middle-class man. As Franklin becomes a famous scientist, he poses with experimental paraphernalia. By the time he is 60, he sits beside a bust of Newton, in a blue velvet suit with gold trim -- a picture of intellectual and worldly success. Ten years later, in 1776, his newborn country sends him as its minister to France, where Franklin adopts a new look -- a plain dark suit, a cap of marten fur and long straight hair. The French went wild. Franklin seemed like a 70-year-old child of nature, or of Rousseau (Rousseau, Bailyn notes, had worn a similar fur cap in a famous portrait). Franklin's face appeared on prints, medallions, busts and teacups. The apotheosis came in a 1778 portrait by Joseph Siffred Duplessis. Bailyn writes that "this face -- hatless now -- is worn, the skin pouched, the eyes somewhat puffed and tired." Yet it "radiates experience, wisdom, patience, tolerance . . . unconstrained by nationality, occupation or rank." Franklin had become identified "with humanity itself, its achievements, hopes and possibilities." All these images were propaganda -- by boosting himself, Franklin boosted the United States. But he hit his grandest note when he employed the fewest artifices.
