Gore Vidal's Inventing a Nation

Yesterday I finished Gore Vidal's Inventing a Nation, a small and stylish history of the early United States focused on Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton. After reading Mr. Vidal's little book, I am taking a new interest in, and finding new appreciation for, the Founders, of whom I had previously only been very familiar with Jefferson and Franklin (who pops up from time to time in Inventing). In particular, I have always viewed Hamilton as a villain, likewise for Adams, and Washington I have always seen as nothing more than the instrument of his cabinet. Further, it always seemed to me that Hamilton's authoritarianism and monarchism were the symptoms of a feeble mind not unlike that of our most recent president, a belief which has dissolved after digesting Vidal's 189 pages (though, as a lover of Jefferson, I still cannot help but think Hamilton a bit of a pest).

But Vidal is truly the star of his own book, appearing now and again as "this author," and in the final section in a conversation with John F. Kennedy. Vidal's ability to stylize, to craft, to persuade, to guide a narrative is unequaled by nearly all historians, who too often neglect their prose, as if good writing should either happen by accident or not at all. Gore's talent for making beautiful sentences is on par with his abilities as a first-rate academic, and he clearly realizes that a historian's job should be seen as aesthetic as well as empirical. Consider this passage, which I underlined while reading but which might as well have been selected at random:

"Now, two centuries and sixteen years later, Franklin's blunt dark prophecy has come true: popular corruption has indeed given birth to that Despotic Government which he foresaw as inevitable at our birth. Unsurprisingly, a third edition of the admirable Benjamin Franklin: His Life As He Wrote It, by Esmond Wright, is now on sale...with, significantly--inevitably?, Franklin's somber prediction cut out, thus silencing our only great ancestral voice to predict Enron et seq., not to mention November 2000, and, following that, despotism whose traditional activity, war, now hedges us all around. No wonder that so many academic histories of our republic and its origins tend to gaze fixedly upon the sunny aspects of a history growing ever darker. No wonder they choose to disregard the wise, eerily prescient voice of the authentic Franklin in favor of the jolly fat ventriloquist of common lore, with his simple maxims for simple folk; to ignore his key to our earthly political invention in favor of that lesser key which he attached to a kite in order to attract heavenly fire."

Perhaps, if all histories were written this way, Americans would take more interest in their past.

This is no doubt Vidal's mission in writing Inventing a Nation: Today's Americans must remember the most distant days of the republic in order to preserve it. The work is not just a stylistic retelling of the early years of the United States; no, through the selection of detail and flash-forwards to the times of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and W. Bush, Vidal makes a case for why Americans should understand the actions, thoughts, and motivations of the Founders. The problems of the modern era were in many ways foreseen by bricklayers of nationhood (as indicated in the above quote about Franklin), and remembering their words and deeds is crucial to preserving an authentic sense of what it means to be American. Knowing their virtues and faults, their steps and missteps, their consistencies and contradictions -- seeing them as individuals both public and private -- this is the way to unearth the past and bring it to life.