Albert Furtwangler: American Silhouettes: Rhetorical Identities of the Founders. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, February 17, 1988.
Silhouettes appealed to the rational individualism fashionable in eighteenth-century Europe and America. These black-and-white profiles depicted enough particular features to make the subject recognizable, but not more than that. They make an individual as close to an idea as an individual can get—an outline, a form, a profile.
Political rhetoric also presents a selection of features. To this day, politicians concern themselves with their ‘image,’ a thing specific enough for ‘name recognition’ but general enough to leave the blemishes out.
Professor Furtwangler teaches English for a living, and rhetoric interests him. He modestly describes his chapters as silhouettes; they are really succinct commentaries upon the silhouette self-portraits of several principal American Founders: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Marshall. He sees that these men crafted profiles of themselves in words in order to educate American citizens in the principles of republicanism.
The senior statesman of the group, Benjamin Franklin, “is not easy to comprehend.” Modeling his literary style on the plain, smooth prose of Joseph Addison, he carefully opposed the Puritans of Boston (and later the Quakers of Philadelphia) with essays “teasing readers out of thinking too seriously or moralistically,” inclining them toward the practical and good-humored temper of commercial republicanism. “A far cry from pulpit moralism,” Franklin’s silhouette presents a “joco-serious, light-but-penetrating, knowing-but-unknown being” whose “knack of ingratiating himself with a public of common readers” effected a moral and political revolution with shrewd indirection.
John Adams “had little opportunity for popularity,” as Furtwangler courteously phrases it. Adams was a lawyer; though an intellectual, he avoided the ideological compulsions of later revolutionizing literati, having trained his intelligence and moderated his passion by the study of Blackstone and the practice of law courts. Furtwangler discusses Adams’s Novanglus letters, in which he debated a Loyalist fellow-attorney on the topic of the separation and balance of powers. “Both argue like good lawyers, but despair of a legal solution.” This points to the limits of the law, as understood by lawyers themselves. Yet Furtwangler’s concentration on rhetoric prevents him from considering either the philosophic or political proofs framing the legal debate. He calls Adams and Adams’s opponent “Whig and Tory twins”; he does not see that the Revolution itself proved Adams right to hold consent more essential to politics than force, even as the revolutionaries deployed force to defend the principle of consent.
With refreshing unfashionableness, Furtwangler devoted two chapters to George Washington, whose reputation has been in eclipse for a century. At Valley Forge, Washington had Joseph Addison’s Cato performed. This play has none of the urbane modernity Franklin found in Addison’s Essays; it rather “translates” the principles “of republican Rome into the sturdy language of modern Britain.” Here Furtwangler does see the limits of legalism. While British law and custom embodied liberty, many Americans regarded true liberty as “austere personal virtue in [a nation’s] people,” the virtues Cato had and the British rulers lacked. The American revolutionists’ call for liberty had little to do with libertarianism, and not at all with libertinism. Furtwangler does less well when he turns to Washington’s Farewell Address, in which chapter he expends so much space reporting the speech’s origins that he never says much about how the finished product ‘works’ rhetorically.
With Thomas Jefferson, we return to modern political philosophy. Furtwangler writes of “Jefferson’s trinity”—Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the men he believed the greatest who had ever lived, “without exception.” Furtwangler refuses to adulate the Sage of Monticello, whose reputation ascended as Washington’s declined: “on close inspection, Jefferson’s intellect was not that extraordinary.” Unfortunately, Furtwangler tries to catch that unextraordinary mind in a contradiction that isn’t really there. He criticizes Jefferson’s criticisms of Hamilton and Adams, those devotees of the British Constitution, while “proclaim[ing] his own devotion” to three undeniably “British minds.” But it was the British Constitution’s mixture of monarchic, aristocratic, and popular institutions, a mixture found in Aristotelian and Ciceronian political philosophy, which Jefferson objected to. Bacon, Newton, and Locke are ‘moderns,’ critics of Aristotle; moreover, far from being merely British minds, their thought transcends the regime that sheltered them. Jefferson knew exactly what he was rejecting, and what he was promoting: a new understanding of reason, in and out of public life, one capable of putting constitutions on a more ‘popular’ foundation.
Furtwangler begins to acknowledge the place of reason in politics, and particularly in constitutional law, when he turns to Chief Justice John Marshall’s argument for judicial review. But unlike Marshall, Furtwangler cannot conceive of reason as an impartial judge. If, as reasonable tradition has it, a party to a dispute shall not also judge it, “does not the same stricture apply to a judge who claims that his court alone has the power to interpret the fundamental law?” It does, indeed. However, having also prudently rejected Jefferson’s notion of holding a new constitutional convention in each generation (to keep up with what he expected to be new political-scientific advances), Furtwangler can do no more than believe the Constitution “a web of strong and articulate wills,” not a product of reason at all.
This descent into Nietzscheism forces an otherwise unfashionable scholar to invoke the trendiest feature of Constitutional interpretation today: the ‘living Constitution.’ To his credit, even in this he has the good judgment to differ from the Biden and Kennedy tribe, who would have the Supreme Court or (when a suitably ‘progressive’ person occupies the office) the President lead us toward the ever-receding Promised Land of perfect egalitarianism. Furtwangler rather wants every generation to feature a large contingent of ‘founders,’ who will check one another and thereby avoid tyranny. The real American Founders saw this sort of thing to be far-fetched, and so should we. The ‘living Constitution’ remains a vehicle for petty ambitieux who imagine themselves great. The spirit of such persons conflicts sharply with Professor Wurtwangler’s own mind, whose civility and manly refinement Washington would have recognized at once as belonging to a fellow gentleman.
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