Creation Myths

To repeat a gentleman whose comment I saw while posting Joseph Ellis’ new book on my iRead last night, American Creation was not nearly as good as Founding Brothers.

The premise, summarized in the subtitle, is a good one: triumphs and tragedies at the founding of the republic. The triumphs, according to Ellis, involve use of space and time to the advantage of the young nation — Washington adopting a guerrilla strategy against the British, Madison crafting a government that posterity could cultivate as it saw fit. The tragedies, as one would expect, lead back to the inability of early American leaders — Jefferson, especially — to form an effective policy for Native Americans and black slaves.

This symmetry fits well in the current trend of popular scholarship on the period, wherein the author walks confidently but knowingly between idolatry and absolute suspicion, indulging, occasionally, in a lyrical portrait but striving to let fact speak louder than myth.

Ellis has a particular talent for this style, which is what makes Founding Brothers­ — and, indeed, parts of American Creation — such a pleasure for both the heart and the mind, the dreamer and the skeptic in each of us. But his latest set of essays simply doesn’t congeal as the previous one did.

Or maybe it congeals too well. One of the most frustrating things about this book is that Ellis tries to fit each story into his triumph/tragedy model, to the point where you almost feel he is abusing his subject to string together a narrative.

As is sometimes the case with historians who alternate between major studies (in the last decade, Ellis has written biographies of Jefferson and Washington) and collections of shorter works, you wonder whether some of what you are reading in the latter is just dregs of the former, and perhaps better left where it lay after the first go around.

Of course, the opposite is just as possible — an author can let a story blossom in a long essay in a way it couldn’t as a caveat to a larger narrative. That is the case with the best chapter in American Creation, “The Argument,” which chronicles James Madison’s dogged pursuit of a constitution that favored a strong national government. By turns a biographical sketch, a philosophical debate, and an enthralling tale of haggling, nose-counting, and power bargaining, the story of the great Federalist victory is well worth reading and re-reading. Put simply, it stands on its own, and seems best told as a long essay.

Too many of the others, put simply, do not. Rather than episodes in their own right, they seem cobbled together to serve Ellis’ thesis.

The opening essay, about 1776, attempts to touch on far too many events (as any essay about that year would), and does none of them justice. Even when David McCullough devoted an entire book to the year, he focused only on the campaigns of Washington’s Continental Army, rightfully rendering the clamor of delegates and journalists as mild echoes in the mind of a beleaguered commander in chief. Ellis touches on this, too, in his second essay, but seems so committed to his argument about the importance of geographical space that he makes it seem as though the most important thing the Army ever did was hunker down at Valley Forge. No small feat, to be sure, but hardly the key to success in a war that lasted more than five years.

The middle of the book, beginning with “The Argument,” and followed by essays on Native American relations and the birth of the Republican Party, are where Ellis does his best work. Yet even these chapters are marred by Ellis’ thesis, which is often dashed across the end of each essay like Zoro’s Z. His urge to count each story as either a triumph or tragedy begins to wear on the reader. You want the importance each story to speak for itself.

The result is that American Creation leads the reader on a tortuous journey, and the effect is torturous. To wander from the fervor of ’76 to the realpolitik of the Louisiana Purchase in the lives of such diverse men as the founders were and expect to emerge with coherent storyline is fanciful for a scholar as extraordinary as Ellis otherwise is.