Recently I finished reading Joseph P. Ellis’ Founding Brothers. It is an excellent look into some of the most fundamental relationships and issues that shaped our country in its formative years. Here are a few excerpts I found interesting from the book:
What in retrospect has the look of a foreordained unfolding of God’s will was in reality an improvisational affair in which sheer chance, pure luck – both good and bad – and specific decisions made in the crucible of specific military and political crises determined the outcome (5).
So is Ellis’ attempt to rub deity out of the nation’s historic beginnings. Obviously, Ellis is not writing from a biblical perspective. Instead, he chastises the Founder’s religious outlook from a purely secular world-view. Here’s how I think this should be re-written: What in retrospect has the look of sheer chance, pure luck – both good and bad – and specific decisions made in the crucible of specific military and political crises was in reality a foreordained unfolding of God’s will that determined the outcome. Ah – the very look of God’s providence every time.
Regarding Aaron Burr:
His grandfather, the great theologian Jonathan Edwards, had once said that we were all depraved creatures, mere spiders hanging precariously over a never-ending fire. But Burr’s entire life had been a sermon on the capacity of the sagacious spider to lift himself out of hellish difficulties and spin webs that trapped others (21).
Compare this to Ian Murray’s account from his biography of Jonathan Edwards: “In a career as a soldier, lawyer, and politician – becoming Vice President of the United States – he lived ‘without God.’ Dying, virtually friendless, in 1836, Burr asked that he might be buried as near as possible to the feet of his father and grandfather in the Princeton burial ground” (Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography, 445). [Note my post on “Princeton’s Treasures” and see a picture of Aaron Burr’s headstone in front of Edwards’ grave.]
What Voltaire was to France, [Benjamin] Franklin was to America, the symbol of mankind’s triumphal arrival at modernity (109).
No quibbling here. Just not sure I share Ellis’ positive take on such an arrival at modernity.
Being a fan of Jim Collins’ book Good to Great and thinking about the fox and the hedgehog analogy, I appreciated this quote:
The modern British philosopher Isaiah Berlin once described the different perspectives that political leaders bring to the management of world affairs as the difference between the hedgehog and the fox: The hedgehog knows one big thing and the fox knows many little things. [George] Washington was an archetypal hedgehog (134).
I have also heard similar comparisons in modern Presidents, i.e., President’s Carter and Clinton were the micromanaging, detailed oriented fox-types while Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush were more big-pictured, hedgehog-like. Time will tell who were the most effective.
Nothing earth-shattering here, just a few thoughts from what was overall a good book.
