On Republican Governors of Virginia

Well, if the polls are any indication, it looks like Virginia will have itself a Republican governor-elect at the end of the day today.

In honor, or perhaps trepidation, of Robert McDonnell's upcoming four years at the helm, it seems only appropriate to announce our next biography, that of a former Republican governor of Virginia (but written by a Democratic senator from Colorado): Gary Hart's James Monroe.

Before we start with the last Founding Father to run the country, though, we'll take a trip to James Madison's house, Montpelier.

A Question of Greatness

Alright, four presidents in, and I feel it's about time to ask: when is anyone going to be any good at being president?

The four biographies we've read so far, without an exception, point out that their subjects were better at whatever they were doing beforehand than being the chief executive. Jefferson himself even goes so far as to keep being president off of his tombstone, opting instead for his roles in writing the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statutes of Religious Freedom, as well as founding the University of Virginia.



Washington does a decent job as president, but nothing special; his job as Commander-in-Chief is to hold the country together in its fragile newness. Adams not only signs the Alien and Sedition Acts--pretty indefensible, no matter how hard any biographer might try--but he also manages to become the first one-term president. Jefferson violates his party's principles (no advocate of small government is going to be OK with buying a whole lotta territory without Congress's approval); not to mention the fact that Jefferson hates being president so much he essentially bails four months before the end of his second term, leaving Madison (the president-elect) to run the country (oddly enough, Wills's biography of Madison points this, but Bernstein's biography of Jefferson doesn't mention it at all). And you don't get to be a great president if the nation's capital gets burned to the ground on your watch (again, a Republican has to realize that one of his party's platforms--no standing army--might not be without its disadvantages).

And these are the Founding Fathers! The guys we look up to as Paragons of Presidential Prestige!

Maybe it's because of the newness of the whole thing; they're making it up as they go along. After all, no one was campaigning for the post--such a thing was considered disgraceful then--but they did do enough backchannel work to get the jobs. Perhaps, with only a few people to talk to about being president and very little American history to learn from (not to mention how little republican democracies had ever existed), we should expect some stumbles.

Garry Wills points out something interesting about Madison in the closing chapter of his biography; that despite the bungling of the War of 1812--despite the fact that "he accomplished not a single one of the five goals he set out for the war to succeed"--Madison still managed to hand the reins over to James Monroe, a member of his own party.

"Given all these factors," Wills writes, "historians have not boosted Madison, considered as president, out of the average rank. On the other hand, they do not count him a failure--and they cannot. He was too popular at the end of his second term. He must have been doing something right." The emphasis is mine--if you're considering Madison as a Founding Father, he does pretty well.

Wills continues: "Despite the problems and setbacks of his chosen course, he never panicked. He was coolest at the darkest times. Admittedly, he was helped in this by his very flaws. In his provincialism and naivete he continued to underestimate the British, thinking they must have been badly harmed by his embargo."

What's more American than taking your flaws and turning them into advantages for you? Madison may not have been a great president, but he got the country through its first official war, rebounded from the burning of Washington, and managed to secure a peace with England that's lasted since. And that's good enough to get you on some currency.

The Littlest President

I had this idea, a while ago, that the first four presidents--Founding Father presidents--could easily be compared to the Beatles. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are obviously the Lennon-McCartney of the group; they do a lot of good work together, they love each other, fight a bunch, then make up. George Washington is George Harrison; quiet, underrated.

That, of course, means that James Madison is Ringo. Because he's short. And fourth.

This is unfair. Madison does some pretty incredible things both before he's president and later during his presidency. He writes a third of the Federalist Papers. He's the Father of the Bill of Rights. He's as insistent as Jefferson--maybe even more so--about the separation of church and state (and as Garry Wills points out, organized religion hasn't flourished nearly as well in any other industrialized country as it has in the US). He gets the country through its first war ever, and in doing so, sets it on its way to eventual world power.

Of course, to do so, he has to reverse his course on almost everything. But, as Wills points out pretty often, consistency isn't his strong point, and several times, one of Madison's faults will turn out to be his strong suit (and vice versa).

But, as Wills also points out, he's got the problem of following those other three guys. He's never going to crack the top ten. And even though Ringo wrote some decent songs ("Don't Pass Me By" comes to mind), he's always going to be overshadowed by John, Paul, and George (Harrison, not Washington).

Outgunned!

Everything I've written below about Jefferson and Monticello is done so much better, and with lovely art to boot, by Maria Kalman in her blog for the New York Times.

The Colonel and Monticello

It has occurred to me already, four months into this project, that writing a biography of someone is an act of love. You become attached to the person, reading his or her letters and diaries and journals, tracing steps across the continents. You start to think that you really know your subject, and certainly you do, more so than 99% of the rest of the populace. It's your job--your duty, even--to translate his or her life into modern-day language, to revivify them. That's a heavy thing to have to do. You might get a little defensive sometimes about the flaws of the person you love.

Or a lot defensive, in the case of Jefferson. Witness the man who led our tour of Monticello; if he told us his name at the beginning of the tour, I forgot it the moment another staff member addressed him as "The Colonel." This is where we met him, on the steps of Monticello:



I was very excited about the steps of Monticello--you see, one of the things I've always liked about Jefferson is his inventiveness--stands that let him read five books simultaneously, closet space in the high, formerly wasted upper space of the house, little lazy susans that allow food and wine to appear magically in the dining room. The ceiling of the front porch of Monticello is the first chance you get to experience this kind of genius:



It's a compass attached to the weathervane; Jefferson the agrarian scholar can step out on his porch during a storm and learn the direction of the wind without getting wet. Brilliant!

We skipped it without a mention, and went inside. Now, to be fair to the Colonel, he did point out Jefferson's days-of-the-week clock in the entry hall, and a few other gizmos, but this set a tone. In side the entry hall, the Colonel pointed out a mastodon tooth of Jefferson's as proof of his scientific curiosity, but did not mention my favorite Jefferson fact: that he told Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for mastodons while they explored the Louisiana Purchase, as Jefferson was sure they still roamed out there somewhere.

No mention of this from the Colonel. We were doing a Great Lives of Great Men tour today.

And then, in the next room, it kicked into a higher gear. The Colonel had been discussing something or other--Martha Washington, I think, since we were in her receiving room--when, apropos of nothing:

"Now, this business between Mr. Jefferson and a slave of his is NOT scientifically proven, and even if it was true, it doesn't change A WORD of what he wrote in THAT DOCUMENT!" the Colonel yelled, and pointed to a copy of the Declaration of Independence on the wall.

Wait, what? Where did that come from? No one had mentioned Sally Hemmings at this point, and even if we had, it was the official position of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation--the people who own Monticello and the Colonel's employer--that Jefferson fathered at least one child with Sally.

The feeling in the room had shifted. When the Colonel asked for questions, one man raised his hands and asked why Jefferson had died bankrupt (quick answer: he loved spending money), something the Colonel had mentioned in his run-up to the explosion.

"I won't answer that here," he said. "Let's let the man remain solvent while we're under his roof."

Yep, we were definitely in the realm of hardcore subject love. The "Mr. Jefferson" cinched it for me; this guy had to be a graduate of the University of Virginia (ahem, sorry, "Mr. Jefferson's University") back in its all-male days. Nothing like seeing your idol, your model yanked down off his pedestal to make you defensive about him.

The Colonel gives a tour of Monticello that won't be available in a dozen years: the uncomplicated, brilliant genius of the Revolution. A guy who didn't fund the newspaper enemies of his own President (as TJ did while Washington's Secretary of State), a guy who didn't sleep with his slaves, and certainly not a guy who put his genius to work to avoid the more problematic aspects of owning other human beings. Those clever lazy susans I mentioned earlier? They let food and wine reach the table without requiring a single slave to appear in the room.

Sigh. It's been a difficult week for separating the man from his work (paging Roman Polanski and John Phillips). I'm ready to move on to James Madison, who's complicated for a whole other set of reasons.

We went to Monticello, part one

Oh, you mean the other Monticello. The one on the back of the nickel? The most famous private residence in America? The house that looks like a single story but is actually two?

Yeah, we went there. More on that later. But on our trip to Canada at the beginning of August, we ran into this:



Is there any other president you'd want to evoke in naming your restaurant? Richard Nixon's California Cuisine? James K. Polk Salad Bar? Jefferson is an epicure, among the million other things he also is, and so this actually makes a little sense. The man had a massive wine collection--big enough to write about, 200 years after the fact. I remember learning as a child that Jefferson had introduced the tomato to America, eating a bunch of them to prove that they weren't poisonous (they are related to nightshade, after all). So a restaurant isn't too far off the mark.

What's interesting about this Monticello is its menu, which seems to be a mostly creole/cajun palate, something that surprised me. Two possible connections, though: Jefferson did make the Louisiana Purchase, and Jefferson was a Southerner through and through. No matter how aristocratically we may think of him now, he viewed himself as a Virginia planter (although plantation owner is more accurate) before anything else. His home reflects that; more soon on it.

Lions and Tigers and Henry Clay, oh my!

I feel like we're stepping into the unknown. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson--sure, everyone knows those guys: patriots! statesmen! on money!

But James Madison seems like the end of the diving board--from this point, it's a long stretch to the next familiar president (Lincoln, although you might make a case for Jackson). And I feel, too, like we're about to head through a mysterious area of American history, that of post-Revolution to the Civil War. I know a little bit about this time period, but it's all leftovers from high school: the Missouri-Maine Compromise, the War of 1812, and, umm...umm...

One thing I had hoped this project might do was to create a sense of continuity to American history, a path from Washington to Obama that told a story about this country. Now that we're done with the exciting opening scenes, it's time to move into the ordinariness of everyday governing.

Towards that end, we're reading Garry Wills's James Madison. A short biography for a short president (oh, don't worry--that's only the first of many short jokes to come).