My mom lent me "Jefferson's Demons" by Michael Knox Beran because "there were a lot of classical references in it". On my
sad and pathetic blog I linked to a
review in the Claremont Review of Books, associated with the Claremont Institute of Powerline fame. This is not a wingnut review. Dr. Yarbrough described the book accurately.
Beran first of all points out that after Washington died, many Americans expected the remaining Founders to contend for supreme imperial power.
Quotes on the flip.
First quote:
Would John Adams emerge as a dictator? Would Hamilton? Would Jefferson himself?
The ghastly spectacle of emergent despotism was ever before the eyes of the prime contenders for power. It was a vision overlaid, to their eighteenth-century sight, with the gory phantasies of the Roman revolution--images of imperial butchery in the Forum, of republican marble stained with civil blood...So real, at that time, did the possibility of a Ceasarean coup d'etat seem that men who had long shown a scrupulous respect for their country's laws and ideals were tempted to ignore, destroy, or make a mockery of them. John Adams signed the Sedition Act. Jefferson, after the Sedition Acts went into effect, flirted with the idea of persuading Virginia and Kentucky to threaten secession from the Union...Hamilton, in a moment of anger, wondered whether a sneaky way could not be found to undo the damage of the recent New York voting, the election that ensured the triumph of Burr and the Republicans.
This is the 1800 election, which was thrown into the House between Jefferson and Burr.
Second quote:
The conventionally glorious act for Hamilton to have undertaken would have been to work for Burr's election. If glory were defined as what Julius Caesar [one of Hamilton's heroes] would have done in similar circumstances...Caesar...would have set himself to the election of Burr. The effect of Burr's elevation would have been republican chaos, and Caesarean ambition requires precisely such chaos if it is to thrive...Burr had already intimated to Hamilton a dissatisfaction with the "miserable paper machine" of the Constitution. Why, Burr asked Hamilton, had he not, as a major general during the crisis over France, overthrown the pathetic government? After all, Burr said (in French), "great minds don't bother about small things."
But Hamilton helped Jefferson in the Electoral College, although the two men had their differences, shall we say.
The irony is that Jefferson did not pursue radical reform, abolishing Hamiltonian economic devices such as the national bank, when he was President, although he had no use for them ideologically at all.
Third quote:
Each of the two coursers struggled fiercely to outdistance the other. But by the close of the election of 1800, each man had come to believe that the other's virtue was less dangerous than that of the remaining aspirant. Each saw in the other a man who, in spite of his loftier inclinations, had learned to obey a drab civic genius. This explains why Hamilton labored so strenuously to ensure that Jefferson, not Burr, became president in 1801 and why Jefferson, to the end of his life, said that Hamilton was in his personal character an honest man, something that could never, even remotely, be maintained of Burr.
I wish here that I had the copy of "Founding Brothers" I borrowed to see what other statements Jefferson made about Hamilton that weren't so complimentary late in life.
Beran points out later on that when Burr was tried for treason, not even his own followers wanted anything to do with him. Americans did not desire kings so naturally that they would give the crown to Aaron Burr. This is supposed to show that America was not in the danger of Caesarism that was thought.
By the Republic, it's John Kerry! The choice in our election was between lofty ideals and a drab civic genius. Kerry may have perpetuated Bush policies by such things as staying in Iraq until it was stable, also. OK, I got that out of the way.
As the eighteenth century had the nightmare of Bonapartism and Caesarism, we have the nightmare of fascism. Fascism seems to be more rhetorical with freepers. They are certainly worried about atheistic despotism, and they throw the word "Nazi" around quite a lot, but they seem to think that liberals are so dangerous that America needs someone who will pursue glory above all. They have a right not to want another 9/11 to happen, but to say that we will ever be a (Muslim) state like Iran is not in the foreseeable future.
I wonder how far the analogy of Bush and Caesar could go. Hitler is one of the most evil people who ever lived. To say simply that someone is in love with power and in love with ambition, and wants to subvert the republic from within, is more measured than saying he is a genocidal murderer. (Bush is in a network of mass murderers in Iraq.) Unfortunately I think Bush really believes that G-d put him where he is now.
Btw, I have never read Gore Vidal's "Burr", and I am so out of sorts with him I may never.