The Art of Manliness - The Surprising Pessimism of America's Founding Fathers

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:10.780 Now, when Americans think about their country's founding fathers, they tend to think of them

00:00:14.100 as cool and competent figures who were supremely confident in superiority and longevity of

00:00:19.000 the Republican government they had created.

00:00:20.720 But my guest says that nearly all the founders experienced great internal and external conflict

00:00:25.240 in conjunction with the new government and can be greatly pessimistic about the future

00:00:29.120 of the democratic experiment they had helped birth.

00:00:31.600 His name is Dennis C. Rasmussen.

00:00:33.080 He's a professor of political theory and the author of Fears of a Setting Sun, The Disillusionment

00:00:37.340 of America's Founders.

00:00:38.760 Today on the show, Dennis unpacks how four of the founders, George Washington, Alexander

00:00:42.260 Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, ultimately came to worry that the American

00:00:46.380 Republic wouldn't last past their own generation based on concerns that ranged from the rise

00:00:50.620 of partisanship to the lack of virtue amongst the American citizenry.

00:00:53.940 Dennis also discusses why it was that one founder, James Madison, remained optimistic about the

00:00:58.580 future of the country.

00:00:59.600 We end our conversation with why the disillusionment of the founders actually carries a message

00:01:03.260 of hope for us.

00:01:04.480 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash founding fathers.

00:01:18.060 Dennis Rasmussen, welcome to the show.

00:01:20.460 Thanks for having me.

00:01:21.260 So you got a new book out, Fears of a Setting Sun, The Disillusionment of America's Founders.

00:01:25.960 Now, I think when most Americans think of the founding fathers, they're almost like demigods.

00:01:30.060 They likely imagine these men in powdered wigs who were high-minded and who coolly and

00:01:35.600 rationally created a government that would last for the ages.

00:01:38.720 But in your book, you make the case that most of the founding fathers, most of the signers

00:01:42.700 of the Constitution were disillusioned with the government they had created.

00:01:46.280 And a lot of them thought it wouldn't even last a generation.

00:01:49.440 So how did you pick up on this disillusionment?

00:01:51.620 Well, in some ways, I guess it was hiding in plain sight.

00:01:55.340 I, like many Americans, I've long enjoyed reading, you know, the big popular biographies

00:02:01.340 of the founders that seem to come out almost every year by folks like Joseph Ellis, Ron

00:02:05.260 Chernow, Gordon Wood, and the like.

00:02:07.440 But it often struck me over the years that the, you know, the stories were generally meant

00:02:11.640 to be inspiring and uplifting.

00:02:13.920 But the endings were rarely very happy.

00:02:17.580 On the contrary, almost all of the leading founders ended up being, later in their lives,

00:02:21.560 rather disappointed in the government, the nation they'd helped to create.

00:02:25.560 And this seemed like a really interesting fact, of course.

00:02:27.820 I was surprised when I looked around at the scholarship on the period that no one had really

00:02:32.520 pursued this point in a systematic way.

00:02:35.080 So I decided to have a go at it myself.

00:02:38.020 And once I did, once I started systematically going through the founders' letters and other

00:02:43.920 writings, frankly, disillusionment was really all over the place.

00:02:47.720 I'm not pulling at strings here or trying to infer disillusionment from a few stray comments

00:02:53.000 here or there.

00:02:53.600 There's just a vast historical record attesting to their anxieties and disappointments and

00:03:00.300 sometimes even despair about the country's future, which is all the more striking given

00:03:04.820 that they're all keenly aware that everything they wrote would be poured over by posterity,

00:03:10.300 right?

00:03:11.040 And still, their growing disappointment in what America had become was something that it wasn't

00:03:16.260 even something that they tried to hide from the future generations.

00:03:19.600 So for each of them, there are just dozens and dozens of letters and other writings, maybe

00:03:23.980 hundreds in the case of John Adams, in which they bemoan the fate of the country that they'd

00:03:28.640 helped to create, often in very overwrought, hysterical terms.

00:03:33.180 And I just think that, you know, given the perennial interest that Americans have in their

00:03:37.960 founders, it's really an amazing thing that this isn't better known or more talked about.

00:03:43.320 Okay, so in your book, you focus on the disillusionment of four founding fathers.

00:03:46.740 You have George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.

00:03:51.640 And each one grew pessimistic about the government they formed for different reasons.

00:03:56.120 So let's start with George Washington.

00:03:58.060 What drove his disillusionment with the Constitution and the government he helped form?

00:04:01.700 Well, the key source of Washington's disillusionment was the rise of political

00:04:08.040 parties in partisanship, which he thought were just fatal to Republican government.

00:04:13.400 And these worries really set in for him, I think I'd say in 1792, in the run-up to the

00:04:18.740 second presidential election.

00:04:21.920 So he thought, basically, that the country's first couple years went pretty great, all things

00:04:25.820 considered.

00:04:26.240 But then during that time, partisanship sort of began to brew beneath the surface, starting

00:04:32.400 within his own cabinet.

00:04:33.620 So it was led by Alexander Hamilton, who's, of course, the Treasury Secretary, as well as

00:04:38.940 the leading figure in the emerging Federalist Party, and Thomas Jefferson, who's Secretary

00:04:44.120 of State and the leader of the Republican Party.

00:04:46.620 And the Hamilton-Jefferson rivalry, really their hatred for one another, you know, stayed mostly

00:04:52.620 beneath the surface, I think, for the first year or two.

00:04:55.340 But by 1792, it started to break out into the press, to spread across the public more

00:05:01.180 broadly.

00:05:02.320 And Washington was just filled with disgust.

00:05:04.780 And so everyone at the time at least professed an aversion to parties.

00:05:10.260 But Washington really meant it.

00:05:11.660 This was something from the beginning to the end of his public life.

00:05:14.460 He's constantly worried about parties.

00:05:16.200 He's constantly warning his fellow citizens about the dangers of partisanship.

00:05:21.100 But of course, partisanship just continued to grow and grow, certainly over the course

00:05:24.860 of his second term, even more so, I'd say, during his short retirement.

00:05:29.200 So by the time of his death in 1799, he was convinced that not just, you know, the Hamiltons

00:05:35.220 and Jeffersons, not just the political elite, but also the American people more broadly were

00:05:40.400 thoroughly and irretrievably partisan.

00:05:44.300 And he had always insisted since his days commanding the Continental Army that Republican

00:05:49.620 government just couldn't survive under those circumstances.

00:05:52.800 And this is why I think it's not really that surprising that his later letters are just

00:05:57.160 littered with predictions that some kind of crisis was imminent.

00:06:01.800 And that's why I suggest that in some ways, Washington's political career was the reverse

00:06:06.480 of his military career, right?

00:06:07.980 So in politics, he won every election unanimously.

00:06:10.980 He got his way on almost every policy dispute.

00:06:14.020 But in the end, he failed in what he saw as the key effort to prevent partisanship from

00:06:19.020 overrunning the country.

00:06:20.440 So I say in politics, unlike in the revolution, he won most of the battles only to lose the

00:06:26.280 larger war.

00:06:27.780 Well, can you explain Washington's, you know, why you abhorred party politics so much?

00:06:31.720 Because like I said, a lot of most of the founders, like, you know, publicly would say

00:06:34.400 this.

00:06:34.640 Yeah, it's terrible.

00:06:35.180 But Washington, this was like, this meant a lot to him.

00:06:38.240 So I mean, what drove that?

00:06:40.560 That's a good question.

00:06:41.440 I think part of it was that he thought that partisanship was just a sign of a bad character.

00:06:47.320 So if you're being partisan, that means you're being partial, right?

00:06:50.420 You're putting the interests of some parochial group ahead of the public good, which meant

00:06:55.760 that you weren't a true patriot.

00:06:57.820 You weren't exhibiting the kind of disinterested virtue that Washington so prized.

00:07:01.620 But he also thought that parties would be, as I said before, fatal to Republican government.

00:07:06.460 He thought that parties would sow conflict among the people.

00:07:10.220 They would open the door to corruption and foreign intrigue. 0.98

00:07:13.520 They would prevent the government from being well administered, right?

00:07:17.200 When there's a sort of standing opposition party whose job it is to try to prevent the

00:07:22.200 president, the leaders of Congress from getting things done.

00:07:24.420 Now, of course, today, it sounds almost impossibly naive, right, to suppose that parties would

00:07:29.780 never emerge in America.

00:07:31.560 But most of the other founders, frankly, had the same expectation.

00:07:35.800 The Constitution itself was designed under the assumption that parties wouldn't play much,

00:07:40.260 if any, role in American politics.

00:07:42.380 So today, I think most political scientists would say that we need parties.

00:07:46.140 Democracies can't really function without parties.

00:07:48.100 But that's, it's just one area where Washington and the other founders had a very different

00:07:53.360 vision for what democracy would look like.

00:07:56.220 One interesting point that I liked a lot and insight you had about Washington's why he

00:07:59.900 didn't like partisanship was it was likely influenced by his experience as a general of

00:08:03.880 the military, too, where in the military, you had to have everyone on the same page or else

00:08:08.580 you wouldn't win.

00:08:09.460 And he likely carried over that idea to his civil leadership.

00:08:14.300 That's right.

00:08:14.920 And I think it was also partisanship within the Continental Congress, the kind of partisan

00:08:19.480 bickering that often prevented him from getting the money and the troops that he needed.

00:08:23.880 So certainly that, you know, he thought you needed national unity for any kind of great

00:08:29.160 undertaking, whether it's winning independence or launching this new government.

00:08:33.420 Can you give us an idea?

00:08:34.720 Because I mean, I think when we think about party politics, our reference is what's going

00:08:38.280 on now in our country in the last 20, 30 years.

00:08:41.260 What was the acrimony like amongst the parties back in the 1790s?

00:08:47.980 Sure.

00:08:48.740 And, you know, it is a striking thing.

00:08:50.540 We have these, as you described, group of very high minded figures.

00:08:53.460 They are all professed this aversion to partisanship.

00:08:56.920 And yet they very quickly within a year or two, they split up into a pair of hostile opposing

00:09:02.620 ideological groups.

00:09:04.460 Partly, I think it was frankly a matter of personality.

00:09:06.560 As I suggested, Hamilton and Jefferson really just hated one another.

00:09:10.660 Their clash was a sort of unusual one insofar as Hamilton was cast as a champion of the economic

00:09:17.340 elite, despite being himself a self-made immigrant, whereas Jefferson liked to present himself at

00:09:23.300 least as the apostle of humble farmers, whereas he himself was a rich, well-connected slaveholder.

00:09:29.160 But of course, there's far more than just personality at play.

00:09:31.260 So the two sides, the Federalists and Republicans, had very different visions, sort of policy

00:09:36.520 visions for what the new government should do.

00:09:38.680 So one of the big flashpoints for controversy was that Hamilton created this sweeping financial

00:09:44.420 program that was designed to try to get the country on a sound economic footing.

00:09:49.640 And it was, it did.

00:09:50.700 It was amazingly successful.

00:09:52.780 But Jefferson and the Republicans saw it as part of a vast conspiracy by scheming money men

00:09:58.020 to fleece the poor, to corrupt the young nation.

00:10:00.340 More generally, the Federalists advocated a robust exercise of federal power, especially

00:10:06.640 by the president, whereas Jefferson and his followers tended to prefer reserving more power

00:10:11.840 for the state governments.

00:10:13.860 Foreign affairs came into play, too.

00:10:15.640 The Federalists tended to side with Britain in foreign affairs, whereas the Republicans

00:10:18.820 sided with revolutionary France.

00:10:21.080 But when it came down to it, each side really saw the other as an almost existential threat to

00:10:27.040 the country.

00:10:27.460 The Federalists tended to see the Republicans as more or less unreconstructed anti-Federalists,

00:10:34.180 which is to say opponents of the Constitution, opponents of the government under which they

00:10:37.840 were living.

00:10:38.920 They thought that the Republicans basically wanted to go back to the disastrous situation

00:10:43.680 that the country had been in under the Articles of Confederation.

00:10:46.040 And the Republicans on the other side thought that the Federalists were essentially monarchists

00:10:50.600 at heart, that they wanted to put a crown on Washington's head, make him the new King

00:10:54.040 George.

00:10:55.140 And so having each side see the other as effectively treasonous, you know, it didn't exactly foster

00:11:02.180 reasonable compromise between the two sides of the kind that Washington expected.

00:11:05.920 Well, and you make this case, too, with Washington.

00:11:07.400 So throughout his career, he tried to stay above partisanship.

00:11:10.580 But then as he got older, after he was president, he actually kind of became increasingly partisan.

00:11:16.460 What happened there?

00:11:18.420 Yeah, I think some historians would say that Washington was a partisan, a Federalist all

00:11:23.200 along from the very beginning of his political career.

00:11:25.840 I think that's too strong.

00:11:27.180 I think for his first term, at least, he managed to steer a pretty even course between the two

00:11:32.120 sides.

00:11:32.560 So he had a small cabinet, only four people, and it was evenly balanced.

00:11:36.300 You had Hamilton and Henry Knox, Federalists on one hand, and Jefferson and Edmund Randolph

00:11:41.840 were Republicans on the other hand.

00:11:43.780 And so he was always, for every policy issue or question that came up, he's always presented

00:11:49.120 with both sides.

00:11:50.100 He tried to sort of balance, mediate between them himself.

00:11:52.600 And I think he did a fair job, the fact, the very fact that he kept Jefferson and Hamilton

00:11:58.500 in the same cabinet for almost four years is something of a miracle.

00:12:01.980 But then, you know, as time went on, by the end of his second term, Jefferson and Randolph

00:12:07.380 had both left the cabinet, as had Hamilton and Knox, for that matter.

00:12:10.940 And Washington was eventually, maybe forced, I guess isn't too strong of a word.

00:12:15.600 He eventually replaced them all with rock-ribbed, second-rate Federalists, which I think is a 0.93

00:12:21.400 sure sign of how far he drifted into that camp.

00:12:24.860 And then he went even further during his retirement.

00:12:26.800 He, during those three years, he corresponded almost exclusively with Federalists.

00:12:33.140 He, in his correspondence, he started referring to Republicans as the French Party rather than

00:12:37.940 true Americans.

00:12:39.440 So I think he did eventually succumb to the kind of partisan rancor that he so abhorred.

00:12:45.300 I don't know if there's one thing that we can point to that would explain this conversion.

00:12:49.180 Part of it, surely, was that the Republican press started attacking him openly and rather

00:12:55.460 viciously during his second term, which I'm sure put him off.

00:12:58.740 The Republicans' unwavering support for the French Revolution, even after it turned monumentally

00:13:03.700 bloody, also had a lot to do with it.

00:13:06.340 And it was just true that Jefferson and Madison spent a lot of time working against his administration,

00:13:12.880 his policies, even while Jefferson was still in the cabinet.

00:13:16.340 And so, you know, I guess in some ways it's not surprising that he drifted into the Federalist

00:13:20.520 camp, but it's also a sure sign of just how deeply he failed and they failed that by the

00:13:28.180 mid to late 1790s, less than a decade into the new government, this partisan divide is

00:13:33.380 so wide that even George Washington, right, even this figure of almost Olympian stature can't

00:13:39.260 manage to straddle the two.

00:13:41.260 Okay.

00:13:41.380 So Washington partisanship was the thing that got him disillusioned.

00:13:44.000 Let's talk about Alexander Hamilton.

00:13:45.460 What drove his disillusionment with the government?

00:13:48.820 So Hamilton's main worry was that the national government wouldn't have sufficient vigor or

00:13:54.580 energy, particularly in relation to the state government.

00:13:57.580 So Hamilton was a more consistent, more unabashed proponent of a strong central authority than

00:14:03.340 any of the founders were.

00:14:05.400 And, you know, from the very beginning, he was convinced that the Constitution didn't do

00:14:09.400 enough to set up this kind of energetic government that he wanted.

00:14:12.660 So he gave a really remarkable speech at the Constitutional Convention in which he basically

00:14:18.640 said that they should imitate the British system as closely as they could.

00:14:22.020 For instance, that he said the president and senator should, after being elected, should

00:14:26.200 serve for life.

00:14:27.480 And then on the last day of the convention, he said that, quote, no man's ideas were more

00:14:31.840 remote from the Constitution than his work.

00:14:33.620 So, essentially, he thought that the government had to have a great deal of energy, as he called

00:14:39.440 it, so that it could stand up to the states, so that it could stand up to other countries,

00:14:44.340 and just so that it could govern effectively and protect people's liberties and the like.

00:14:49.200 And so Hamilton spent most of the 1790s, the first half of which he's in Washington's cabinet,

00:14:56.620 the second half of which he's out of politics, formal politics.

00:14:59.320 But he spends the whole decade basically doing everything he can think of to build up the

00:15:03.360 government to enhance its powers.

00:15:05.380 He develops this sweeping financial program.

00:15:08.480 He worked to build up the military during the Whiskey Rebellion and what was known as

00:15:12.660 the Quasi-War with France.

00:15:14.640 He did everything he could to expand the president's powers in both domestic and foreign affairs,

00:15:20.100 especially while Washington, the war hero Washington is in office, and it's just kind of hard for

00:15:25.480 people to object too much. But he was never convinced that he'd done enough, right? Jefferson

00:15:30.420 and Madison and the Republicans were always there fighting him, hounding him, keeping him from

00:15:35.780 realizing the full extent of his vision. So he just never thought that the federal government they

00:15:40.660 created was sufficiently energetic.

00:15:43.640 And I thought it was interesting, too, you talk about another rivalry that Hamilton have.

00:15:48.020 He had a rivalry with John Adams, who was also a federalist.

00:15:51.780 But this rivalry, it seemed more personal than political.

00:15:56.200 Then you also highlight that sometimes Hamilton, these ill feelings towards Adams,

00:16:00.820 it caused him to cut off his own political nose just to spite Adams.

00:16:07.200 What was the acrimony between those two? And how did that get in the way of Hamilton pushing his

00:16:11.120 idea about the country should have a strong national or federal government?

00:16:16.640 Yeah. So Hamilton and Adams did hate each other, despite being members of the same party,

00:16:20.940 despite having, you know, in the broadest terms, similar worldviews. Part of it here,

00:16:25.620 too, is just personality. They're both headstrong, kind of volatile, and so maybe they were bound

00:16:30.480 to clash. But I also think Adams never wanted to go quite as far as Hamilton did in building up the

00:16:36.720 government and especially building up the army during the quasi war. And as a result, as you hinted in

00:16:42.500 your question, in the election of 1800, Hamilton published this really outrageous screed about

00:16:49.180 basically how unfit for the presidency Adams was, which in turn all but ensured that Hamilton's

00:16:56.320 arch enemy Jefferson became the next president, right? So you had the split between the Federalist

00:17:00.440 Party, between Hamilton and Adams and their followers. This opens the door for the Republicans

00:17:05.320 to step in. And that's really when I think Hamilton's hopes for the future were essentially

00:17:11.000 dashed for good, right? He'd always feared that the government was too weak. And now here, Jefferson

00:17:16.340 and the Republicans are elected with a mandate to pare down its power still further. And so in 1802,

00:17:23.460 a couple of years into Jefferson's presidency, Hamilton wrote this really, I think, touching letter

00:17:28.140 to his friend Governor Morris, in which he lamented that after all he'd done after so many years to try to make

00:17:35.740 this work, to try to make the government work, it just wasn't going to happen. He went so far as to call the

00:17:41.140 Constitution a frail and worthless fabric. And he lamented that this American world is not made for me. So by the

00:17:48.440 end of his life, by the end of his, by the time of his famous duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton thought that the

00:17:54.380 already weak government was only going to get weaker over time, and that little but disillusion and disorder

00:18:01.900 could be expected for the foreseeable future.

00:18:05.760 We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

00:18:09.500 And now back to the show.

00:18:11.500 Okay, so another guy, end of his life, didn't think it was going to happen in the country. Let's talk about John Adams.

00:18:17.000 What was his disillusionment about?

00:18:19.240 So his worries centered on the lack of civic virtue among the American people. He thought that

00:18:25.640 Republican government depended not just on having the right institutions set up, but also on the

00:18:32.180 people having the right character, that people needed a sense of patriotism, of duty, a willingness

00:18:37.720 to put the public good ahead of their own selfish interests. And this is something he insisted on from

00:18:42.460 the beginning to the end of his long career in politics. He thought that people needed to be willing

00:18:47.420 to sacrifice on behalf of the public, as he himself so often did, at least in his own eyes.

00:18:53.060 Early on during the Revolutionary War, Adams sometimes dared to hope that, well, maybe this

00:18:57.900 will happen. Maybe the people will be sufficiently virtuous once we've attained a dependence.

00:19:03.500 But at least by the 1780s, mid-1780s, if not earlier, he was convinced otherwise.

00:19:08.980 And so his disillusionment came quite a bit earlier than it did for the other figures in the book,

00:19:13.820 before the Constitution is even a twinkle in the framers' eyes.

00:19:16.520 And it lasts so long. He doesn't die until 1826. So it lasts for almost a half century.

00:19:22.980 One of my favorite quotations from the book comes from a letter that Adams wrote just a month or so

00:19:28.920 after being inaugurated as the nation's first vice president. So he's writing to Abigail,

00:19:34.500 asking her to come to New York. New York is where the first temporary capital was. And he says to her,

00:19:40.280 we have to think of New York as our home for the next four years, assuming, of course,

00:19:44.020 that the government lasts that long. So he's not even sure that the Constitution or the government

00:19:48.240 that it created is going to last for four years. But really, there are dozens, if not hundreds of

00:19:54.320 these wonderfully colorful and cranky letters from throughout Adams' life, where he constantly

00:20:01.400 bemoans the character of the American people, the follies, the vices of his fellow citizens.

00:20:06.320 And he's really one of the first great critics of the idea of American exceptionalism, this idea that

00:20:13.340 the American people are somehow innately more virtuous or more fit for democracy than other

00:20:18.620 peoples are.

00:20:19.840 Well, where did this sort of high-minded, extremely idealistic idea of the type of character a citizen

00:20:27.020 of republic needs to have in order for a republican government to last, where did Adams get that from?

00:20:32.440 Well, I think it was mostly from reading. So remember, there's hardly any republics in the

00:20:38.260 world at this time, certainly none as big as the United States was, even then, limited to the first

00:20:42.900 13. So there weren't a whole lot of concrete examples to look at or to draw on. But Adams was

00:20:50.480 very well-read. He was as well-read in political theory and history and the like as any of the founders

00:20:55.640 were. And the lesson that he drew from his studies was, again, that republican government

00:21:02.360 required civic virtue. So as he saw it, monarchical government didn't require the same kind of virtue

00:21:07.320 because the people in charge aren't in charge, right? You don't need as much virtue among the

00:21:11.820 people. But under a system of popular self-government, he thought that if people were always looking out

00:21:17.920 for their selfish interests, then politics would just be an insoluble clash of conflicting interests.

00:21:26.880 So there was times when Adams was hopeful, like during the Revolutionary War, he was kind of hopeful

00:21:30.620 because he saw Americans sort of embracing this idea of civic virtue that he had, making sacrifices for

00:21:35.120 something bigger than themselves. What was it about, like, that he saw after the Revolutionary War and the

00:21:41.040 formation of the Constitution? He was like, yeah, no, Americans, they're corrupt. They lack virtue. 0.98

00:21:47.760 What was it that he saw that he pointed to? Well, I think he just looked around and saw people not

00:21:54.560 living up to the expectations, the frankly and possibly high expectations that he'd sent for them.

00:22:01.440 He would see people, you know, again, during the war for independence, sometimes he would see people

00:22:05.960 rallying around the flag, rallying against the British, and he'd think, okay, maybe this will work.

00:22:09.880 But then, you know, every time a soldier deserted the army, every time someone showed that they

00:22:14.620 cared more about making money than the public good, you know, he'd dash off a letter to Abigail or one 0.97

00:22:19.520 of his friends lamenting how selfish and corrupt and addicted to luxury Americans were. Some of this 0.96

00:22:24.900 came when he was abroad. So for most of the 1780s, he was serving abroad in various posts as an envoy for

00:22:32.580 the United States. And he would get lots of letters from people back at home telling him how, you know,

00:22:38.000 what Hamilton was doing with this big financial program, how addicted to luxury Americans were.

00:22:43.640 And so some of it was even secondhand. But once he returned and got back into politics,

00:22:48.040 he would see the partisan bickering, the selfishness. He just, the people never lived up

00:22:53.280 to the expectations he'd set for them.

00:22:55.180 Yeah. Speaking of these like cranky letters, he would write. There's one, he, I forgot who he's

00:23:00.080 writing to. I think it's Mercy Otis Warren. He said, but madam, there's one difficulty,

00:23:05.160 which I know not how to get over. Virtue and simplicity of manners are indispensably necessary

00:23:10.240 and republic among all orders and degrees of men. But there's so much rascality and so much

00:23:15.360 veniality and corruption, so much avarice and ambition, such a rage for profit and commerce

00:23:20.040 among all ranks and degrees of men, even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there's

00:23:24.280 public virtue enough to support a republic. He was pretty, pretty pessimistic.

00:23:28.340 And if I'm remembering, I think that was from 1776, right? This is very early on.

00:23:32.120 Right. 1776. So, okay. He, he didn't think Americans had the character to be self-governing.

00:23:39.400 So, you know, he started thinking, well, maybe this isn't going to last. So he started coming

00:23:42.560 with some ideas after, you know, later on in his life on how they could sustain a country or a

00:23:49.080 government, even though the people weren't, didn't have the virtue for it. What were some of those

00:23:53.180 ideas that Adams had?

00:23:54.900 Okay. So there's a brief time just before and during the constitutional convention. So he's in London at the

00:24:00.840 time, but he writes his magnum opus. There's a big sprawling three-volume work called Defense of

00:24:06.920 the Constitutions of the United States. And by the constitutions, he meant the state constitutions,

00:24:11.440 since the U.S. Constitution hadn't been written yet. And in this work, he seems to, he's at least

00:24:17.420 toying with the idea that if you have a properly balanced government, could that solve the problem,

00:24:22.180 right? Could the country survive under a Republican form without virtue? But I think those hopes didn't

00:24:28.220 really last for that long. Once he returned to the United States and kind of saw the way things

00:24:32.700 were working, he didn't think the right balance was being struck. And so I think those hopes went

00:24:37.200 away fairly quickly. He toyed with the idea in the early 1790s that, well, if we have enough

00:24:43.040 kind of pomp and splendor, especially surrounding the president, surrounding Washington, maybe that

00:24:49.020 will get people to revere the government and be attached to the government enough. He at times even

00:24:56.060 hinted that maybe we would have to introduce some element of hereditary rule that maybe the president 0.95

00:25:01.960 and or senators would need to be passed down from father to son and that this would keep the

00:25:08.440 commotions that surrounded elections at bay. I think maybe the most interesting, you know,

00:25:14.120 I don't know if it was an idea so much as a sort of reprieve from his habitual pessimism

00:25:20.220 came during the war of 1812. So this is in the midst of his long retirement. So during the war

00:25:25.900 of 1812, he looks around and he sees Americans rallying together against their common enemy once

00:25:32.420 again, Britain, and exhibiting sort of unity, patriotism that he hadn't seen since the Revolutionary

00:25:39.320 War. And this sort of buoyed his hopes for the nation's future, at least for a few years. 0.94

00:25:44.000 And at this point, he came to think or maybe to worry that war may be necessary to inculcate

00:25:50.940 civic virtue, right, to get people sufficiently attached to their country to arouse patriotic

00:25:55.400 feelings, and thus that war might be necessary to maintain the long-term health of Republican

00:26:00.940 government. And he writes a number of letters to John Quincy and others at this time that, you know,

00:26:06.220 maybe too much peace and prosperity is a bad thing. Maybe it's inevitably going to lead to decadence

00:26:11.840 and corruption and the like. But he's also obviously discomforted by this idea that, well,

00:26:16.900 people can't be virtuous without murdering one another, as he put it.

00:26:20.800 Okay. So he, so it seems like Adams, like his, he would sometimes be optimistic. Some guys get

00:26:26.040 pessimistic. At the end of his life, was he pessimistic or optimistic?

00:26:31.740 You know, he sort of seemed to go back and forth. I think during the Revolutionary War,

00:26:35.920 and then again, at the very end of his life, he veered back and forth day to day,

00:26:41.180 even sometimes within the same letter, he would seem to go back and forth. The last letter he ever

00:26:46.060 wrote was about the 50th anniversary, that they were going to celebrate the 50th anniversary of

00:26:51.160 the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1826. As many listeners will probably know, that ended up

00:26:56.420 being the day that he and Jefferson both died. And he wrote a letter about the upcoming celebration

00:27:02.460 in which, you know, I'm sure the people who are writing to him asking for a comment on it

00:27:08.000 were expecting a kind of tribute to American democracy from one of his venerable founders,

00:27:13.580 you know, something that they could read amid the fireworks and parades. But instead,

00:27:18.180 he kind of punctures their hopes a little bit. He says, basically, it's too soon to tell. Was the

00:27:22.780 American Revolution the brightest or the blackest page in American history? We'll find out. We'll see

00:27:27.640 what people make of this country after I'm gone. And so he ends up going out, you know, sort of

00:27:32.840 hurling posterity a challenge.

00:27:34.440 Okay, so let's talk about Thomas Jefferson now. And you make the case that he took the longest

00:27:38.400 to get disillusioned. In fact, he was pretty much optimistic about America up until, you know,

00:27:43.940 late in his career. Why was that? And then what drove Jefferson's disillusionment?

00:27:49.120 Right. So Jefferson was the perennial optimist among the founders for the vast majority of his life.

00:27:55.560 He had this deep abiding faith in the American people. He believed in the idea of American

00:28:00.820 exceptionalism that Adams found so wrongheaded. So even when things didn't go his way during the

00:28:07.420 1790s, so even when Hamilton enacted his financial program later in the decade when the Federalists

00:28:13.080 passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, even when things didn't go his way, he was always sure that

00:28:18.700 things would turn out right in the end. Because he was confident that sort of deep down at the bottom

00:28:24.400 of their hearts, the American people were almost all good Republicans with a small R, and in fact,

00:28:29.900 also Jeffersonian Republicans with a capital R, right, that they're really on his side.

00:28:34.680 And he thought that things did turn out right in the end in 1800. So in 1800, he's elected president,

00:28:40.740 the Republicans swept to power in Congress. And he saw this election not just as the temporary victory

00:28:47.200 of a political party. He saw this as the permanent triumph of Republican liberty in America.

00:28:51.900 He writes all these sort of self-congratulatory letters to his friends where he says,

00:28:56.040 we've made it. We won after all. The ship is in port. You know, America succeeded.

00:29:01.340 And then, of course, he spends eight years as president. He succeeded for another eight years

00:29:05.780 by his closest political ally, James Madison. And then another year, eight years after that,

00:29:10.920 he succeeded by his acolyte, James Monroe. So in some ways, it's totally predictable, of course,

00:29:15.840 right, that he retained his optimism for so much longer. The Republican Party that he founded

00:29:20.620 basically won, his Federalist opponents essentially disappeared from the political scene.

00:29:26.560 But then in the last, I'd say, decade or so of his life, between 1816 and 1826,

00:29:32.620 even more starting in, let's say, 1820, even he lost heart. So there's a variety of reasons for

00:29:40.380 Jefferson's disillusionment. We had things like the spread of industry, the rage for banks and

00:29:46.620 financial speculation, where he always preferred a more agrarian society. He was worried by what he

00:29:52.620 saw as the usurpations of the Supreme Court under the leadership of his cousin, Chief Justice John

00:29:58.060 Marshall. He was very worried about the consolidation of more and more power in the federal government,

00:30:03.140 even with the Republicans themselves in charge. But I think the thing that really led to his outright

00:30:08.760 despair was the division between the North and the South over the spread of slavery,

00:30:14.220 which came to the fore, especially during the Missouri crisis of 1820, 1821. So during this time,

00:30:22.000 he writes a very famous letter where he says that this conflict awoke me, filled me with terror like

00:30:29.240 a fire bell in the night. I considered it once as the death knell of the Union. And so Jefferson

00:30:34.660 basically foresaw the path of the Civil War, that once there's a geographic line dividing the country

00:30:41.260 with a deep moral principle, deep moral opposition between the two, that is never going to go away,

00:30:47.540 that every event, every year is just going to mark it deeper and deeper. And Jefferson concluded this

00:30:53.360 letter with a just, I think, unforgettable expression of regret. I don't have it in front of me, but he says

00:30:59.020 something like, I'm now going to die believing that everything that we fought for in 1776 was in vain.

00:31:06.140 It's all going to be thrown away by the present generation. My only consolation is that I won't

00:31:12.020 myself live to weep over the destruction of the Republic.

00:31:15.240 Yeah, that's heavy. That's really heavy.

00:31:17.240 Very.

00:31:17.480 Well, listen, can you flesh this out about Jefferson? This is why he thought the Missouri

00:31:21.080 compromise, the Missouri crisis would cause this rank. And this is really interesting because you

00:31:25.540 really, you bring to the forefront this sort of these self-contradictory paradoxical views

00:31:30.480 Jefferson had about slavery. Because on the one hand, this is the guy who wrote the Declaration

00:31:36.320 of Independence, this document about human freedoms and human liberties. Publicly, he denounced the

00:31:42.420 institution of slavery, but we all know privately he held slaves. But then later on in his life,

00:31:47.780 even though earlier in his career, he sort of denounced slavery and kind of made moves to make it

00:31:51.520 illegal, he really started kind of pushing for slavery or allowing states that, new states into the

00:31:57.720 country to allow them to be slave states. So can you walk us through that? Like what was going on?

00:32:02.180 What was going on in Jefferson's mind?

00:32:04.940 Yeah. I mean, look, we could do a whole podcast on Jefferson and slavery and barely scratch the

00:32:08.840 surface. There's so much that could be said about it. But basically early in his career, Jefferson,

00:32:14.760 I think fought a reasonably forceful battle against slavery, at least in the political realm.

00:32:20.100 So he not only wrote the Declaration, where he says all men are created equal and the like,

00:32:24.080 he tried to include a rather stinging denunciation of the slave trade in the Declaration of Independence.

00:32:29.460 It had to be taken out to get the southern states to join on, but he wanted to include it in there.

00:32:34.860 He drafted a couple of gradual emancipation laws for his home state of Virginia. He proposed to ban 0.72

00:32:40.400 slavery from all the western territories, included some really harsh denunciations of slavery in his

00:32:45.380 book. And so, you know, whatever he did in his personal life back at Manichello, where,

00:32:50.260 of course, he kept hundreds of people in bondage. In the political realm, I think, frankly, he did as

00:32:55.360 much as you reasonably could have done in the 1780s. He went even further than most of his

00:33:00.540 contemporaries, even in the north would go in fighting it. But then basically, he stopped trying,

00:33:06.680 even trying after that. During the 1790s, he's much more worried about fighting Hamilton and the

00:33:12.000 Federalists. So he sort of puts slavery on the back burner. As president, he does next to nothing to

00:33:17.240 fight slavery, even when there's this big question about once he makes the Louisiana Purchase about

00:33:22.800 slavery being expanded to the new territory. He basically doesn't lift a finger to try to stop

00:33:27.080 it from expanding. And then during his retirement, he doesn't just do nothing. He does worse than

00:33:33.040 nothing. As you suggested, he actively advocated the expansion of slavery to Missouri, to the western

00:33:39.840 territories, which is something he himself had opposed when he was younger. And so the reason he did so

00:33:46.140 was he adopted this theory, a rather crackpot theory, I think it has to be said. But the

00:33:51.020 theory is known as diffusion. And the basic idea is that, okay, if we allow slavery to expand to new

00:33:58.080 territory, that's not going to lead to an increase in the number of enslaved people. It's just going to 0.99

00:34:03.440 make them more spread out. And that spreading them out would have a number of benefits. So for instance,

00:34:08.000 he thought that enslaved people would be treated better if they weren't as concentrated. And so then the 0.92

00:34:13.060 sort of fear of slave rebellions wouldn't be as prevalent. But even more importantly, he thought

00:34:17.760 that spreading out slavery would mean that emancipation would be easier to achieve. Because

00:34:23.220 if enslaved people are more spread out, each individual slaveholder holds fewer people in

00:34:28.720 bondage, well, then they have less to lose if slavery would be abolished. That was the idea. 0.90

00:34:34.240 Of course, it's wildly delusional, I think, to have supposed that, well, we can really combat

00:34:39.340 slavery by giving it free reign, right? Let's make it a big national problem rather than a narrow 0.94

00:34:44.420 southern sectional problem, right? That's like saying, I have this fatal disease. Let me first

00:34:49.260 let it spread throughout my body, and then surely it'll go away.

00:34:52.300 And so as you say, so what happened, so in 1820, there was the Missouri Compromise, and basically

00:34:56.480 said that territories above the 36-30 parallel, except for Missouri, those states, they're going to be

00:35:03.620 free states. And so Jefferson, when he saw that, he's like, yeah, once you have that line, that's

00:35:09.520 just going to cause, once you have that geographic line, that's just going to cause division that you

00:35:14.140 can't heal.

00:35:16.380 That's right. And that every time that there's some new question, the divide between the two will just

00:35:22.660 be marked deeper and deeper. And so he, as I said, he basically foresees the path to the Civil War.

00:35:27.720 He all but predicts what's coming. Okay. So then you go into detail with these four founding

00:35:33.340 fathers, but then you also have a chapter where you kind of, you know, touch on the service of

00:35:36.780 other signers of the Constitution who were just like, yeah, this was, this is a mistake. This

00:35:41.040 isn't going to last. But then you, you highlight there's, there was actually one founding father.

00:35:45.400 He never got disillusioned. And that's James Madison, our fourth president. Why didn't Madison

00:35:50.200 grow pessimistic about the American experiment? Yeah. And I think this is a surprising one in some

00:35:56.000 respects. I don't think people think of James Madison as particularly optimistic. He's very

00:36:00.720 hardheaded and skeptical in certain ways. And he also lived so long, right? Despite being a rather

00:36:08.220 sickly hypochondriac, he's certainly the least conventionally manly of the founders, but he outlived

00:36:13.180 them all, right? He didn't die until 1836. He lives well into Andrew Jackson's second term. And through all

00:36:19.780 that time, he remained remarkably confident in the American experiment, despite some surprisingly deep

00:36:27.020 reservations that he'd had at the outset, in the immediate wake of the convention, he wasn't sure

00:36:30.800 the Constitution was going to work, despite us calling him the father of the Constitution. He had

00:36:35.920 deep reservations at the outset, but over time, he grew more and more confident in this lasted

00:36:40.380 through 1836. And so I devote a couple of chapters toward the end of the book to exploring,

00:36:46.440 well, why was he such an outlier in this regard? Here too, I think part of it was just personality.

00:36:53.280 Madison was far more even-tempered, even-keeled than the other founders were. And this sort of

00:36:59.820 unflappableness, I think, surely contributed to his lack of despair. Another factor, I think,

00:37:04.860 was that he had lower expectations than the other founders did about what was politically possible.

00:37:10.960 So his kind of skepticism maybe fed his optimism in the sense that he never expected the American

00:37:17.260 people to always surmount partisanship like Washington or always surmount selfishness like

00:37:22.780 Adams. He never expected the nation to play this grand role on the world stage, to compete with the

00:37:29.700 European imperial powers on their own terms the way Hamilton did. Nor did he even really expect,

00:37:35.080 like Jefferson, that yeoman farmers would get together to wisely manage their political affairs,

00:37:40.960 on a local level. And so these lower expectations, I think, meant that he was less likely to be

00:37:46.560 disappointed in what America ultimately became. I go through a few more in the book. Let me just

00:37:52.480 mention one more factor here that I think went into it, which is simply that by the end of his

00:37:57.900 life, he's the last of the fathers, as he's sometimes called. By the end of his life, Madison had

00:38:03.780 already seen the country endure so much, right? By that point, America's constitutional order had

00:38:09.800 already weathered any number of storms, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the War of 1812, the Missouri

00:38:15.060 Crisis, and so on. And so Madison believed or hoped at least that that meant it could weather a good

00:38:22.200 deal more, right? So the more the nation endured, the more durable it seemed to him.

00:38:27.940 So this idea that your book is called Fears of a Setting Sun, where did that idea of a setting sun

00:38:32.320 come from? So the title comes from a quip from Benjamin Franklin on the last day of the

00:38:41.360 Constitutional Convention. So this is September 17, 1787. It's the last day. The delegates are

00:38:47.300 getting together to sign the document. They line up at the front of the room to put their names at the

00:38:52.580 bottom of the charter. They'd spent the whole year crafting. And according to James Madison's notes,

00:38:57.720 Franklin pointed to the chair that Washington had sat in at the front of the room all summer. So

00:39:04.300 Washington was the president of the convention, and he occupied this high-backed mahogany chair,

00:39:09.980 which you can still see. It's on display at Independence Hall. But the chair had a sort of

00:39:14.680 decorative half sunburst carved into the crest. And so the story goes that Franklin called attention

00:39:20.940 to the sun, and he said, I've often wondered over the course of this summer, looking at that sun on the

00:39:27.400 chair. I've often wondered, was it a rising or a setting sun? Now I have the happiness to know that

00:39:33.680 it is a rising and not a setting sun. And so this is supposed to be sort of emblematic of the founders'

00:39:39.700 optimism, their great hopes for the new government during the founding period itself. And then the

00:39:45.160 play on that for the book's title, Fears of a Setting Sun, is of course that by later in their lives,

00:39:50.580 most of the founders with Madison is really the lone exception, feared that in fact maybe the sun was

00:39:55.720 setting rather than rising. So what do you hope people walk away with thinking after they finish

00:40:00.640 your book? Well, certainly I hope that they walk away with a fuller picture of the founders

00:40:06.580 and their worldviews than you get by just looking at the founding period itself, which we often do,

00:40:12.100 right? I think we need to remember that they didn't somehow stop thinking about politics in 1788

00:40:18.020 after the Constitution's ratified. They, of course, kept living, kept observing, kept thinking about

00:40:22.920 what they'd wrought. And, you know, their later views were also informed by more real-world experience.

00:40:29.900 And so I think it's worth taking a more holistic view of what they said and did.

00:40:34.580 It might sound funny to say for a book on disillusionment, but I hope that readers also

00:40:39.580 walk away with a certain kind of hopefulness about today's world. So there's no question,

00:40:45.640 of course, that the founders' key causes for worry are still very much with us, right? So partisanship,

00:40:51.300 the frequent fecklessness of the federal government, the lack of civic mindedness,

00:40:56.400 the geographical divisions, all of these are still problems. They're certainly not the only

00:41:00.500 problems with American politics. You only have to read the newspaper every day to see that

00:41:04.620 all is not well with the Republic. But, you know, if we take a page from Madison's book,

00:41:10.280 the fact that we've lived with these problems since the founding for more than 230 years

00:41:15.500 suggests that, well, maybe they're not as likely to doom the country as we sometimes fear, right? So

00:41:22.260 we're constantly told that, you know, the death of American democracy is nearly upon us.

00:41:28.120 But then people have consistently said that since the very founding of the country.

00:41:32.400 And, you know, it hasn't happened yet. The country, on the contrary, the country has grown into

00:41:37.300 history's greatest economic and military superpower. So however appalling the state of American politics

00:41:46.160 might be at the moment, and I'm frequently pretty disgusted with it myself, but, you know,

00:41:50.900 it's important to remember that things were far worse in many respects when the founders whom we so

00:41:57.260 admire, when they presided over the country, right? So most obviously, we no longer have widespread

00:42:02.360 chattel slavery. We no longer see the routine dispossession, even massacre of indigenous tribes.

00:42:08.260 On the contrary, basic civil political liberties have never been extended to more people.

00:42:13.520 We no longer face serious, repeated threats of secession and civil war, as the founders constantly

00:42:20.000 did. It seems like every event in the era of the founding caused one group or another to threaten

00:42:24.660 the breakup of the union. We see political violence far less today, even notwithstanding the recent,

00:42:30.440 you know, pretty harrowing attack on the Capitol. But we don't see legislators brawling on the House

00:42:36.380 of Representatives with canes and firepokers. We don't have uprisings like the Whiskey Rebellion and

00:42:41.100 so on. Our elections, our presidential elections, as nasty as they can be, don't really hold a candle

00:42:47.720 in that respect to the election of 1800, which pitted Adams against Jefferson, right? Two of our most

00:42:53.160 revered founders. Even our media, our mainstream media that gets so much criticism today is far more

00:42:59.780 responsible and fact-based than the partisan newspaper of the 1790s were, and so on and so

00:43:05.300 forth. And so, you know, I don't think any of this is grounds for complacency by any means. We have

00:43:10.440 serious pressing problems that we should try to meet, but I do hope that a fuller understanding

00:43:16.360 of the founders and the founding at least helps to summon a broader perspective on these problems.

00:43:23.940 Well, Dennis, this has been a great conversation. Is there someplace people can go to learn more

00:43:26.740 about the book and your work? Well, I'm not on social media, but they can go to either the

00:43:32.560 Princeton University Press website or to my Amazon author page for more on this book and my other

00:43:38.500 books. Fantastic. Well, Dennis Rasmussen, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:43:41.760 Thank you, Brad. I appreciate it. My guest today was Dennis Rasmussen. He's the author of the book

00:43:45.960 Fears of a Setting Sun, The Disillusionment of America's Founders. It's available on amazon.com

00:43:50.480 and bookstores everywhere. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash setting sun,

00:43:54.360 where you find links to resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.

00:44:04.360 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at

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00:44:44.400 into action.

The Art of Manliness - June 28, 2021

The Surprising Pessimism of America's Founding Fathers

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