Picking the Founding Fathers' brains

May 24, 2006|Kevin O'Kelly, Globe Correspondent

What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers, By Richard Brookhiser, Basic, 261 pp., $26

Richard Brookhiser is the author of four previous books on the Founding Fathers -- popular and well-written biographical studies of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, the (original) Adams family, and Gouverneur Morris . ``What Would the Founders Do?," by contrast, is a bizarre book-length Q&A purporting to deliver the Founding Fathers' opinions on everything from campaign finance reform to Hurricane Katrina.

This book is largely a succession of non sequiturs. Brookhiser poses a question -- e.g., ``What would the Founders say about stem-cell research?" -- and then discusses the closest 18th-century parallel he can find to a 21st-century issue, a discussion that often doesn't answer the question. In regard to stem-cell research, the best Brookhiser can do for an analogy is grave robbing to provide cadavers for medical students. He uses the legal ban on grave robbing to lamely conclude that the Founders ``understood science had to heed public opinion and traditional norms." Asking ``How would the Founders have fought the war on drugs?," Brookhiser concludes that the Founders would not have waged a war on drugs. His reasoning, if you can call it that, is that alcohol was 18th-century America's drug of choice, and the new federal government taxed whiskey. Ergo, the Founders would have taxed drugs in the hope of bringing down consumption and raising federal revenue.

Brookhiser performs even greater mental gymnastics later in the book, as when he uses a few lines from Alexander Hamilton on national credit to hint at the need to ``reform" Social Security. And at times he's guilty of blatant padding: ``What would the Founders think of the bell curve?" He's referring to Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's ``The Bell Curve," a 1994 book alleging links between intelligence and race. Does Brookhiser really need to reach back 12 years to find enough issues to fill 261 pages?

``What Would the Founders Do?" isn't entirely without merit. While Brookhiser seldom successfully tells us what the Founders would do about 21st-century issues, he does tell us what they did and thought about 18th-century ones: education, race relations, industrialization, and religion in public life. Any reader naïve enough to buy this book in the hope of finding pat answers to contemporary questions might accidentally learn something about American history instead. He or she will also get a realistic glimpse of the antique heroes we hold in such reverence. Brookhiser shows us the Founders as they were: not only wise statesmen but also racist, elitist, womanizing, back-stabbing politicos who could have concocted a way to finish off Karl Rove over a midafternoon sherry.

In recent years the 18th century has been a reliable money maker for authors and publishers. David McCullough's ``John Adams" and ``1776" were both phenomenal bestsellers. Walter Isaacson's 2003 biography of Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Ellis's 2004 study of Washington got on the national charts as well.

``What Would the Founders Do?" is clearly a hasty effort by Brookhiser to further cash in on the 18th century while it's still in vogue. The back of my advance copy outlines the marketing campaign for this book, which appropriately includes ``Events in All Thirteen Original Colonies." When discussing what the Founders would have thought of this book, he never states the obvious: that Washington and Jefferson, with their money troubles, would definitely have empathized with the urge to make a quick buck.

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