From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DISPATCH
Mad About Madison
As the fourth president turns 250, Americans can't get enough of the Founders.
Friday is the 250th anniversary of the birth of James Madison, and his birthday coincides with a boom in books about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. I was thinking this on Sunday, when my wife and I were walking back from brunch at the home of one of our neighbors in Brooklyn, Gary Rosen, who recently brought out a book called "American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding."
It struck me that within a few blocks of our home, books on the Founders are busting out like crocuses. Not far down the street, the editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, James Grant, is at work on a biography of John Adams. Our second president is the subject of another biography in progress, by David McCullough, whose book on President Truman was a great success. Yesterday Mr. McCullough's manuscript had climbed the Amazon.com sales rank to No. 5,472, nearly three months before publication.
Back among New York-based authors, Richard Brookhiser followed his celebrated minibiography of America's first president--"Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington"--with a lively biography of Madison's co-author of the Federalist, "Alexander Hamilton: American." Hamilton is the subject of yet another biography in progress, by yet another neighbor, Ron Chernow.
Having written on the House of Morgan, the Warburgs and Rockefeller, Mr. Chernow is intent on illuminating the life of the man who laid the foundation for what became the world's mightiest monetary system. When I ran into Mr. Chernow at the movies the other day, he was fairly bursting with enthusiasm over the vastness of Hamilton papers that have become available since the last full-length biography was published in the 1970s.
These days, things are hopping. Last night I found myself a local dinner for the historian John d'Entremont. He gave a reprise on Thomas Jefferson's relations with Sally Hemings so riveting that someone in the audience said, "Get this guy together with Steven Spielberg."
Afterward, I asked Mr. d'Etremont if he shared the sense that something is going on with respect to the Founders. He was quick to respond that there is very much of a surge in interest (he himself is working on a history of Virginia starting 12,000 years ago). "There's such a shortage of greatness in our leaders today that people are searching for greatness wherever they can," he said. "If they have to go back 200 years, they will."
As Mr. Grant puts it: "Everything that Adams was, Clinton isn't." Mr. Grant spends his days peering at the economic indicators and editing Grant's, then goes to his study at home and settles down to Adams's papers. He likens writing a biography to bringing the subject into your home for a year or three. "Adams," he said, "is the best company . . . endlessly brilliant, funny, winning . . . all resolution and earnestness."
Mr. Rosen says that part of the burst of new interest in Madison and the other Founders "has to do with the fact that in our century we've seen such a radical growth in the federal government's responsibilities and ambitions that we've lost sight of the deeper question of the legitimacy of these new ends and how they relate to our scheme of government."
Jean Yarborough and Richard Morgan gave a tour d'horizon in their City Journal piece. They point out that a generation ago when the left dealt with the Founders it was often to question their motives: "As anyone over 30 recalls, it wasn't so long ago that critics spelled 'Amerika' with a k, and scholars made their reputations unmasking America's racist, patriarchal, and genocidal origins."
Much of the new writing, Ms. Yarborough and Mr. Morgan note, has called into question the leftist critique of the Founders' motives. Now when liberals and modern-day progressives fight back, "they understand that they must first ceremonially embrace the Founders before easing them out of the way in favor of revisionist alternatives that hallow their own icons." Or, as they put it: "Right and left, today nobody wants to be on the wrong side of the Founders."
Certainly any working newspaperman would have to remark with amazement on the number of stories of the past generation that have landed him back at the feet of the Constitution, Madison and the men on whose debates he made his notes. Impeachment, abortion, war powers, pardons, campaign-speech regulation, environmental takings, school prayer, monetary policy, capital punishment, the Electoral College, one hardly knows where to begin--or end. It's enough to move one to say that though this is Madison's 250th birthday, we'll need him around for another 250 years.
Mr. Lipsky is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Wednesdays.
