The Secrets of the Founding Fathers
Before we begin our Fourth of July essay, let us all offer deep thanks to Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. Her announcement yesterday of her imminent resignation preserved the nation from a long weekend of news commentary about the arrangements for Michael Jackson’s funeral.
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Doubtless as a patriotic exercise, the History Channel is broadcasting this week a two-hour documentary entitled
Secrets of the Founding Fathers. Fans of the History Channel eventually realize that there is no point in hoping that the network will hire some historically informed persons (preferably themselves) to edit the Channel’s offerings for accuracy, or at least for sanity. The History Channel and its affiliates are in the entertainment business. So, there is no point in complaining that the Secrets of the Founding Fathers mixes social history with conspiracy theory and paranormal research.
As entertainment, it’s not bad of its kind. Some of it, in fact, sounds like an old Firesign Theater album. The bit about the Founders smoking hemp during the Constitutional Convention sounds enough like my recollection of a piece from Everything You Know Is Wrong to raise intellectual property issues. (It’s probably just a coincidence that the music to The Star Spangled Banner sounds not altogether unlike some of the druggier arrangements by Procul Harum.) I had not previously heard the report that the bones of dissection subjects had been found in the basement of Benjamin Franklin’s house in London. Franklin, of course, really did belong to the Hell Fire Club, or at least attend some of its parties. Actually, he joined almost every social club that would have him. Like Harry Truman, he was an inveterate joiner, and for much the same reason: he believed in networking and was unusually good at it.
And then there were the Masons. It is not hard to find Masonic symbols and turns of phrase in the Revolutionary Era. Of course, it is also not hard to find “Masonic” ideas in Locke or Montaigne or any number of other philosophers and statesmen. What is hard is to find ideas that are peculiar to the Masons; that is to say, ideas that originated in the lodges rather than merely being transmitted by them. And as Secrets of the Founding Fathers points out, the word “secret” does not seem to be a proper term to apply to an organization with a large membership (including leaders on both sides during the Revolutionary War) whose identities were known and whose ceremonies were often reported by the press. Masonic symbols appeared in the official symbols and architecture of the early United States not because they were secret but because they were familiar.
An unfortunate drawback to the conspiracy-theory model of the American founding is that it draws attention away from some aspects of that event that were in fact somewhat esoteric, though of course not secret. There is a way in which the success of the American Revolution can be seen as the success of the
Rosicrucian Enlightenment of the early 17th century. As Dame Frances Yates explained in her book of that name, that enlightenment before the Enlightenment was an Anglo-German movement for political reform and scientific progress, the first context in which “progress” was imagined in something like its modern sense. The immediate political hopes of the movement perished at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, starting the Thirty Years War in the process. The hopes persisted, however. The fanciful Rosicrucian literature about an ancient (and wholly imaginary) secret society probably did help inspire the foundation of the equally fanciful (but somewhat more concrete) Masonic organizations a few decades later. Debatable but real degrees of influence are evident in the speculative writing of Francis Bacon, or for that matter in the founding of the Royal Society.
The model of history that underlay both the Rosicrucian Enlightenment and the American founding is essentially millennialist. They looked to the beginning of a new age of knowledge and peace in which, to paraphrase Bacon, the human estate would be ameliorated. One of the most interesting things about this view is that it is traditional. The dawning age is not altogether unlike the Third Age of Joachim of Fiore; a new chapter in the story of the world no doubt, and different in many respects from its predecessor, but still continuous with the real historical past. We may contrast this with the more extreme phases of the French Revolution of a few years later, and indeed with the whole revolutionary tradition of the 20th century and the later 19th. That, too, imagined a model of history of successive historical dispensations, but later revolutionaries were millenarians rather than millennialists. They did not seek to perfect the world they knew; they sought to blow it up and build a new one from the ruins.
We can overestimate this distinction. Taken as a whole, the French Revolution was not a nihilistic event. The radical turn it briefly took may have had less to do with the inspiration behind it than with the extreme stupidity of its opponents. For that matter, there were sober and humane elements in the Marxist and fascist revolutions of the 20th century who were sincere patriots and were genuinely appalled by the turn their movements took. Nonetheless, it does seem to have been the case that the essentially providential model of history that first gelled around 1600 had turned into something far more volatile by about 1790.
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The key thing to remember about the Founding Fathers is that they were Before. They were before capitalism-versus-socialism, before the Rights of Women; before, almost, nationalism. Their counterparts in other lands fifty or a hundred years later would spend rancorous hours debating the choice of a national anthem, the design of a flag, the choice of a national language (God help the state that found it needed more than one). Most perilous of all was the definition of the “nation” a new nation state was supposed to embody. Even the Founders famous indifference to religious establishment was due in large part to the fact they did their work between the time when states regarded an ecclesiastical organization as an essential public function and the time when nationalists (some of them) felt obliged to designate a religion as an indispensable expression of the folk soul.
Some of the Founders’ success really must be attributed to the dumb luck of chronology. They were late enough to inherit a tradition of political practice and an illuminating body of theory, but early enough that they did not have to answer a range of questions for which an informed solution was not yet possible and which might in any case be unanswerable.
Luck will get you only so far, however. Never has this kind of thing been done better. The Founders merit their statues, including the ones with the Masonic compass and square on the plinth.
