The Rules, Time-Tested Secrets for Becoming Father of Our Country. by Paul Berman, Posted

The Rules, Time-tested secrets for becoming father of our country. By Paul Berman, Posted Wednesday, March 12, 1997, at 12:30 AM PT

George Washington was virtuous, but was virtuousness altogether a good thing? This entirely reasonable question turns out to be extremely old. Stendhal posed it in the 1830s in his novel Lucien Leuwen, in which the wealthy young Parisian hero contemplates fleeing the corruptions of monarchical old France for a new start in virtuous republican America. But would Stendhal's hero be able to stand the virtuous republicans? He considers paying a visit on George Washington himself--America's greatest man--at home on his farm. But would he find Washington's conversation bright and sparkling?

"Washington would have bored me to death," Stendhal's hero concludes. (American readers are aghast.) "I would prefer by a hundred times the elegant manners of a corrupt heart."

Now comes the Library of America, with a handsome new edition (published on elegant paper with a lustrous black cover) of the writings of Washington himself, more than a thousand pages of letters and documents of every sort, which allows us to judge for ourselves. The book makes a strange impression. The Library of America, in its admirable effort to present America's literature and classic political documents in pristine form, has adopted the rather extreme policy of publishing its volumes without any sort of introductory guide, which is probably just as well in the case of literary authors whose work is easily approached.

Some authors require an introduction, though--political writers, especially. The Library of America produced a fat 1,500-page volume of Jefferson some years ago, but Jefferson's writings turned out to be a shapeless heap of private letters and peculiar jottings intermixed with an occasional manifesto of immortal grandeur--and to make your way through them unaided was nearly impossible. Likewise with the new Washington volume. Washington was not a book writer, or any kind of writer at all, professionally speaking, but took quill in hand merely to address particular situations as they arose. His Writings, as a result, offer a puzzling mass of personal letters, military records, presidential orations, ringing statements, and random insignificant scribblings, all of them put into chronological order by the Library of America-- which is to say into very little order at all, except that of chance.

Still, the patriotic reader plunges in--and instantly discovers, in the volume's first entry, a document of capital importance in re the insidious, Gallically anti-American accusation offered by Stendhal's novel. The opening document, dating from 1747, when Washington was 15, is a numbered catechism of dos and don'ts called "Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation." Whether this document belongs in a collection of Washington's writings seems a little dubious, given that (as the assiduous reader will discover with a glance at the note on page 1,094 by the volume's editor, John Rhodehamel) Washington did not actually write these Rules but merely copied them from an English translation of a French-language Jesuit text from the 16th century.

The Rules contain 110 numbered passages offering such worthy bits of advice as this, from No. 12, "[B]edew no mans face with your Spittle, by approaching too near him when you Speak," or this, from No. 16, "Do not Puff up the Cheeks, Loll not out the tongue, rub the Hands, or beard, thrust out the lips, or bite them or keep the Lips too open or too Close." No. 90 says, "Being Set at meat Scratch not neither Spit Cough or blow your Nose except there's a Necessity for it." And, at once, from the opening document of Washington's Writings, the suspicion arises that the Father of Our Country was, in truth, a hideous Bore.

Alas! But what makes the unhappy discovery truly appalling is the further incredible discovery that Washington's earnest and humorless Rules are considered by experts to be the key to his entire career, and therefore, in some respect, a key to America's two centuries of national success. Last year a conservative writer named Richard Brookhiser published a biography, titled Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, which made the point that Washington, by keeping in mind his carefully inscribed numbered Rules throughout his momentous life, conducted himself correctly in all the

1 Little Ways (no bedewing of others with Spittle, Hats properly Doffed, and so forth), which led to right conduct in the Big Ways, too, thus to political and military triumph.

Supremely convinced of this point, Brookhiser has gone ahead and brought out his own little edition of Washington's rules under the title Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace, slightly altered to eliminate the 18th-century idiosyncrasies (a pity) and emended with small commentaries by Brookhiser himself, some of them pertaining to events in Washington's life, others solemnly applying of Washington's rules to circumstances of today.

Yet, even Brookhiser, for all his sober devotion to civility as the key to everything, cannot escape noticing something ridiculous, therefore comic, in Washington's rules. And so, bravely embracing what he cannot deny, Brookhiser, in his edition of the rules, throws in some jocularity of his own, with the sure lightness of touch you would expect from an author who has based his biography of Washington on a guide to etiquette. Washington's Rule No. 2 proclaims (in the Library of America's superior 18th-century version), "When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body not usually Discovered." To which Brookhiser gruesomely adds, in his own edition, "A rule often flouted by rap singers and pitchers." Washington's Rule No. 4 says, "In the Presence of Others Sing not to yourself with a humming Noise, nor Drum with your Fingers or Feet." To which Brookhiser adds, "Don't carry a boom box either." And the embarrassments pile up, one upon the other, and the patriotic reader wilts in his chair, and Washington ends up too ludicrous for words.

At least the Library of America's Writings contains an endless supply of additional material. There are military entries full of wampum and warpaths (during the French and Indian War) and complaints to Congress (during the Revolutionary War), which are interesting to read, even if Washington--unlike Grant and Sherman from the Civil War--was not much of a military writer. There is a long amiable letter to the young Lafayette in 1779, in which Washington, in a giddy mood, drifts into a reverie about competing for Lafayette's young wife with Lafayette himself--a funny bit of teasing, followed abruptly by a rueful reassurance, worthy of Stendhal himself, that "amidst all the wonders recorded in holy writ no instance can be produced where a Woman from real inclination has preferred an old man." It is interesting to see how warm he grew toward Alexander Hamilton (he signed his letters "I am Your Affectionate"), and how awkward and self-conscious toward Jefferson, whose allies were berating Washington "in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero; a notorious defaulter; or even to a common pick-pocket."

Naturally, the Library of America edition also contains, hidden here and there in impossible-to-find locations, a number of solemn and stirring documents of state--for instance, the reply, genuinely dear to my own multiculturally American Jewish heart, that Washington made, as president, to a letter from the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I. The congregation had written to congratulate him about something or other (unspecified by the notes), and Washington replied:

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving in on all occasions their effectual support. ...

May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.

The letter is wonderfully gracious--and yet, the graciousness owes everything to Washington's feelings about republican revolution, and nothing at all to what could be learned from a 16th-century Jesuit manual of courtly behavior. http://slate.msn.com/id/2968/

2 D U E L : ALEXANDER HAMILTON, AARON BURR, AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICA

By Katharine Whittemore

Sept. 29, 1999 | "Duel," Thomas Fleming's stunning panorama of the fledgling nation, is a parable of titanic intellect and potential subverted by ambition; of vindictiveness, venality, lust, chimerical visions of empire and, finally, murder. While this description sounds less Aaron Burr than Aaron Spelling, the book is infinitely more complex than TV. To draw a comparison Burr and Alexander Hamilton would understand, "Duel" approaches Greek tragedy in its breadth.

When George Washington died in 1799, his Olympian hand could no longer contain the centrifugal pressures of regionalism, the economic and party factionalism and the competing constitutional interpretations that menaced the young nation. Add the frequent hostility of the major foreign powers and it's easy to see why many wondered whether a civil war or European intervention would administer the coup de grâce.

The cherry on top of this mess was the infamously rancorous presidential election of 1800. Burr, a brilliant political operative, garnered national attention by knocking aside Hamilton's Federalists and their dream of having a strong central government in New York, and instead delivering the Empire State to Thomas Jefferson. Burr's reward? The nomination to serve as Jefferson's vice president. Burr didn't exactly accept or decline. But when the election was thrown into Congress and wound up as an electoral tie, he refused to step aside for Jefferson. Although Jefferson prevailed, Burr's maneuvering earned him the Virginian president's lifelong enmity. Hamilton already loathed Burr for the New York debacle. And virtually all of Burr's peers remained suspicious of him thereafter.

Cut to Jefferson's administration. Burr becomes perhaps the least loyal veep in history, and Hamilton is out of the loop. All three men hate one another. (Hamilton and Jefferson had clashed before, as Washington's secretary of the treasury and secretary of state, respectively.) Virulent animosity was not the only salient vice these giants of the republic shared; Fleming correctly notes that mistresses were a way of life for powerful men.

Burr and Hamilton also shared a military background, and Fleming, carefully referring to the former as the Colonel and the latter as the General, spies a cause as well as a symptom in the relentless and prideful officer's code of the era. All three politicians also nursed ambitions on an amazing scale; for fame was, as Hamilton put it, the "spring of action." Isolated from political influence, Hamilton and Burr each had megalomaniacal fantasies of taking an American army to sweep the Spanish from Florida and the Mississippi Valley. (After killing Hamilton, Burr would, incredibly, act on his dream -- with the collusion of the commander of the United States Army!)

"Fame was inextricably linked with honor and a special kind of achievement," Fleming writes -- honor mingled with the mud of politics under rules that included killing to defend one's good name. Indeed, the duel of the title is just one among many. Incredibly, a Jefferson supporter killed Hamilton's son in a duel at the same spot where Hamilton would die three years later.

So how did Burr's and Hamilton's mutual abhorrence finally distill itself into actual murder? To sift even their last increasingly shrill exchanges is an exercise for a 19th century Ken Starr. Let's hear, instead, from others on the subject: "Ambition," said the tersely eloquent John Quincy Adams. "Peculiar necessity," wrote Hamilton. Fleming's prose trumps them both: "Public prejudice required a man who wanted to remain in politics to conform to the code of honor." And so, on a sweltering summer morning in Weehawken, N.J., Burr shot Hamilton through the hip. He died slowly, after great agony and amid pleas to a skeptical bishop to receive communion after his half-hearted embrace of religious ritual.

To be as masterfully concise as Fleming manages to be is an achievement in itself, for this epic would have challenged Tolstoy. The author deftly ushers us through the Gordian strands of the early American political scene and onto the world stage, where Napoleon reigned, then telescopes back to a meticulously 3 reconstructed page-turner recounting the events leading to the killing that sadly reunites the various threads. The men were larger than life; the stakes included our new Constitution and world domination. In the end, "Duel" does a scintillating job of restoring salient edges that decades of historical buffing have rounded. salon.com | Sept. 29, 1999

4 Scandalmonger By Katharine Whittemore

March 1, 2000 | Which William Safire do we get? The word maven, mais oui. In "Scandalmonger," an uneven demifictional tale of the nation's early calumnies and tabloids -- think the Gap dress and the Keating Five of post-Revolutionary America -- the New York Times "On Language" columnist lets fly often and fervently. "Jacobin milksop," he knights the clerk of Congress. "Flagitious," Alexander Hamilton says of the Adams regime (Middle English for "infamous," in case you wondered). "Petty popinjay," John Adams is pegged.

Nice. Indeed, "petty popinjay" is alliteratively worthy of the former Nixon administration speech writer's famous "nattering nabobs of negativism." But these sundry vocabulary builders do not make up for the patchwork feel of "Scandalmonger." Safire is no Patrick O'Brian -- this is not a seamless immersion into a bygone era. It's more a sort of subpar George Bernard Shaw play, in which the characters exist mostly to advance the era's ideologies and debates. That's not a bad thing; the book compels, but less as a polished work and more as really fine scaffolding.

And what are those ideologies and debates? Republicans vs. Federalists and Freedom of the Press vs. the Alien and Sedition Acts, as prismed through four scandals spanning the years 1792 to 1803. This quartet leads off with Hamilton's sexual and fiduciary shenanigans, then moves to the unconstitutional imprisonments under the Sedition Act, revs up to the rumors of a liaison between President Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings (one tabloid subject crows that her son Tom bears a "sable resemblance" to the other Tom) and caps it all off with the trial that established the concept of malice as the cornerstone of libel law. The players? Hamilton, Adams, Burr, Madison, Monroe and Jefferson, plus such lesser-known luminaries as Vermont congressman and newsman Matthew Lyon -- dubbed Spittin' Lyon after he hawked one in the face of Connecticut Rep. Roger Griswold.

Is there a Deep Throat in all this? Indeed: The novel's prime leaker is a congressional clerk named John Beckley, whose job of copying sensitive papers allowed him to unsettle lots of muck for the raking. (If not for Beckley, Hamilton might have been our third president.) All these characters are diverting, but "Scandalmonger" is most taken up with two men eminently gifted in, as Safire puts it, "the poetry of slander": William Cobbett, a Federalist pamphleteer pseudonymously known as Peter Porcupine, and James Thomas Callendar, a Scots-born ink-stained republican gadfly, aka Timothy Thunderproof. Callendar is the eponymous one, "a dark spirit who chews the cud of his rejection," as Safire writes. A pre-presidential Jefferson, it seems, used Callendar as his attack dog; the Virginian even sanctioned the Scot to strew "papershot," as Safire artfully calls invective, against George Washington, something no politician could do in public and expect to survive. Callendar's reward? Upon gaining office, Jefferson disavowed him -- only to have Thunderproof storm his revenge in print. (He was a prime spreader of the Sally Hemings story.)

Oh, yes -- there's another girl in the book. Quite a girl. She's the beguiling Maria Reynolds, the "statuesque" and "near-violet-eyed" mistress of both Hamilton and Burr and the Monica of the 1790s. Safire even winkingly calls her "that Reynolds woman." The Maria stuff is quite fun in both a laugh-with and laugh-at kind of way; let's just say Safire is no Jacqueline Susann when it comes to boudoir prose. Burr, for instance, is "discreet and controlled, taking his time, with incredible stamina in his lovemaking, watching in the long looking-glass." Hoo!

Things go better when Safire cites primary sources (which, to his credit, he does often). For example, Adams on the ever-randy Hamilton: "A superabundance of excretions." We've acknowledged Safire the wordsmith. What of the amateur historian who wrote a novel on Lincoln called "Freedom"? At its best, "Scandalmonger" shows off this Safire's gusto for research; we learn, for example, that no one shook hands then, in the belief that the act transferred yellow fever. In addition, we're afforded "The Underbook," a 43-page afterword that spells out what's fact (the bulk of the story) and what's fiction (the often ill- advised plot devices, especially a goofy affair between Callendar and Maria Reynolds).

5 In the end, the Safire who is most in evidence is the Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist. "Scandalmonger" pretty much fails in character development and pace. But it redeems itself through the author's greatest strength: his ace powers of synthesis. The quandaries of the day are crisply laid out. "Hamilton thinks that man's nature is evil and that he needs strong government to control his passions," Safire writes. "Jefferson sees man as essentially good and needs to protect his freedom from the monarch's domination. From that flows all the dissension of our time." Well said. salon.com | March 1, 2000 http://archive.salon.com/books/review/2000/03/01/safire/

6 What Tocqueville Missed, Government made all that "volunteerism" possible. By Theda Skocpol, Posted Friday, Nov. 15, 1996, at 12:30 AM PT

Nostalgia is rampant among public commentators today as they look for some critical juncture when U.S. democracy was flourishing more than it seems to be now, hoping to draw inspiration and lessons for what might be done to revive our apparently ailing civic life.

Those of conservative or center-right proclivities characteristically look at America's past through the eyes of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who toured the fledgling United States in the 1830s, gathering observations and ideas that were, in due course, published in Democracy in America. Tocqueville's opus has become one of the modern world's most influential political ethnographies--that is, a set of densely descriptive observations of another nation, written to influence political debates back in one's own country.

That message-to-home aspect of Tocqueville's work is important in understanding its limitations. Alarmed by the simultaneous expansion of democracy and an ever-more-centralized bureaucratic administrative state in post-revolutionary France, he used his explorations of early Republican America to make the case to his own countrymen that they should encourage voluntary associations in civic society as a new buffer against state centralization.

"Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations," Tocqueville reported in a famous, oft-quoted passage. This happy situation was possible, he felt, because extralocal government seemed barely present. "Nothing strikes a European traveler in the United States more," wrote Tocqueville, "than the absence of what we would call government or administration. ... There is nothing centralized or hierarchic in the constitution of American administrative power."

Given Tocqueville's anti-statist purposes, it is not surprising that contemporary critics of the U.S. federal government celebrate the great Frenchman's stress on voluntary associations (understood as functioning in opposition to bureaucratic state power). Still, before Americans plunge forward on a fool's errand, we might want to notice that the best historical social science challenges the claims of conservatives and centrists about when, how, and why democratic civic engagement has flourished in the United States.

Before the American Revolution, many towns of the requisite size for commercialization and urbanization had already emerged, but without a vibrant set of voluntary associations. By the early 1800s, however, the emergence of associations in both smaller and larger communities was outstripping commercial and demographic change. Social historian Richard D. Brown emphasizes that the Revolution, political struggles over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and deepening popular participation in national, state, and local elections served to spur associational life. So did religious and cultural ideals about self- improvement, and growing awareness of extralocal commercial and public affairs through widespread newspaper reading.

Tocqueville himself was well aware of many of these extralocal influences. Present-day conservatives often overlook how much he stressed political participation, marveling at the United States as the "one country in the world which, day in, day out, makes use of an unlimited freedom of political association," which, in turn, encouraged a more general "taste for association."

In retrospect, it is obvious that what social historian Mary P. Ryan has dubbed the pre-Civil War "era of association," from the 1820s to the 1840s, coincided with the spread of adult male suffrage and the emergence of competitive, mass-mobilizing parties: first the Jacksonian Democrats, then the Whigs, and finally, the Free Soilers and the Republicans.

Democracy in America took note of early U.S. newspapers, too. "Newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers," Tocqueville wrote. "Thus, of all countries on earth, it is in America that one finds both the most associations and the most newspapers." Yet, blinded by his negative passions about state power in France, Tocqueville failed to grasp what his observations meant about the early American state.

7 As historian Richard John cleverly points out in Spreading the News: The American Postal System From Franklin to Morse, Tocqueville traveled by stage coach in the "hinterland of Kentucky and Tennessee," remarking on the "astonishing circulation of letters and newspapers among these savage woods." Yet the Frenchman's travels might not have been possible if many stage-coach companies had not been subsidized--through Congress--so that mail could be carried, and representatives travel home, to remote districts.

A well-known quip has it that early modern Prussia wasn't so much a state with an army, as an army with a state. Similarly, the early United States may have been not so much a country with a post office, as a post office that gave popular reality to a fledgling nation. John points out that by 1828, only 36 years after Congress passed the Post Office Act of 1792, "the American postal system had almost twice as many offices as the postal system in Great Britain and over five times as many offices as the postal system in France." In the 1830s and 1840s, the system accounted for more than three-quarters of U.S. federal employees.

Obviously, the institutional structure of the U. S. government had everything to do with the spread of the postal network. The legislative system gave senators and (above all) members of the House of Representatives a strong interest in subsidizing communication and transportation links into even the remotest areas of the growing nation. Special postal rates made mailing newspapers cheap and allowed small newspapers to pick up copy from bigger ones.

The postal system was even more important for civil society and democratic politics than for commerce. Congress could use it to communicate freely with citizens. Citizens, even in the remotest hamlets, could readily communicate with one another, monitoring the doings of Congress, and state and local governments. Voluntary associations soon learned to put out their message in "newspaper" formats, to take advantage of the mail. Emergent political parties in Jacksonian America were intertwined with the federal postal system. Party entrepreneurs were often newspaper editors and postmasters, and postmasterships quickly became a staple of party patronage.

In short, the early American civic vitality that so entranced Alexis de Tocqueville was closely tied up with the representative institutions and centrally directed activity of a very distinctive national state. The non- zero-sum nature of U.S. governmental and associational expansion becomes even more apparent when we consider that most of the big voluntary associations founded in the 19th century prospered well into the 20th, often building toward membership peaks reached only in the 1960s or 1970s and in full symbiosis with public social provision.

The Grand Army of the Republic spread in the wake of state and national benefits for Union veterans of the Civil War, for example. The Fraternal Order of Eagles was so active in promoting state and federal old-age pensions that the Grand Eagle himself received an official pen when FDR signed the Social Security Act of 1935. The great women's federations of the early 20th century were champions of local, state, and federal regulations, services, and benefits for mothers and children. New Deal laws and administrative interventions were vital aids for nascent industrial unions. And the American Legion sponsored the GI Bill of 1944.

Lessons for Today

Maybe the problem today is that many Americans, quite rightly, no longer feel they can effectively band together to get things done either through, or in relationship to, government. The problem may not be a big, bureaucratic federal government--after all, the U.S. national government still has proportionately less revenue-raising capacity and administrative heft than virtually any other advanced national state. The issue may be recent shifts in society and styles of politics that make it less inviting and far harder for Americans to participate efficaciously in civic life, except locally or on very narrow issues.

Data do show an explosion of Washington, D.C.-based advocacy groups between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. But apart from a few on the right--notably the National Right to Life Committee, the Christian Coalition, and the National Rifle Association--the few new big voluntary associations that have been founded have been structured like thousands of smaller ones: They are staff-led, mailing-list associations.

8 Obviously, societal conditions so propitious for encompassing voluntary federations have changed a lot. Higher-educated women--once leaders of many such associations--now have nationally oriented careers, and crowd into cosmopolitan centers. Indeed, by the 1960s, the United States developed a very large professional-managerial elite that was, arguably, more oriented to giving money to staff-led national advocacy organizations than to climbing the local-state-national leadership ladders of traditional voluntary associations.

Voters these days are rarely contacted directly by party or group workers. Politicians may not care much about them at all if they aren't relatively well-off or members of targeted "swing" groups of voters. This has happened in electoral politics at the same time that all our mailboxes are full of computer-generated mailings from single-issue advocacy groups seeking to raise money from paper "memberships."

Were Alexis de Tocqueville to return to the late 20th century United States for another visit, he would be just as worried about these national trends as about possible declines in purely local or small-group associationalism. After all, one of Democracy in America's insights was that vital democratic participation served as a kind of "school," where Americans learned how to build social and civic associations of all sorts. He would also surely be surprised that today's conservatives are using his Democracy in America to justify a depoliticized and romantic localism as an improbable remedy for the larger ills of national politics. http://slate.msn.com/id/2081