Joseph Ellis

On C-SPAN I’m listening to historian Joseph Ellis, speaking at the Commonwealth Club on November 5. Ellis has written two superb and profound books on the American Founding period that I’ve read, American Sphinx and Founding Brothers (discussed by me here). I was looking forward to seeing him speak, but I have to say I’m disappointed. While he makes a couple of good points, he speaks in a disconnected way and has a frivolous manner, occasionally punctuating his remarks with a giggle. He refers to America’s “racism” and blames the early American leaders for not solving the black problem and the Indian problem, even as he adds that there may have been no solution. But if there was no solution, why criticize the Founders for their racism and their racial failure? He says, sounding post-modern, that the story of the American Revolution is one of “irony and paradox.” He says, with off-putting glee, that America was founded as a “secular state, not a Christian country.” To say that America was not a Christian country, because the Constitution says nothing about Christianity, is simply fallacious. The Constitution is not identical to the United States. It is the instrument that established a government structure and powers at the federal level. It does not exhaust the meaning of America as a people and a society. For a historian as sympathetic to the American Founding and as conservative-leaning as Ellis to read Washington’s First Inaugural and Washington’s 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation, which is essentially a consacration of the American people to God, written in language that echoes the Book of Common Prayer, and say that America was “not a Christian country,” shows the disturbing blindness to higher truth that affects even conservative American elites. Thus even the great Washington biographer James Thomas Flexner described Washington as a deist, a manifestly incorrect statement, as is established beyond question by Michael and Jana Novak in their book on Washington. (See note below.)

The sense I get from Ellis’s talk is that he is a man who has conservative dispositions (and who, as we know from his books, is extremely intelligent, with a subtle and insightful mind), but who ultimately doesn’t believe in anything.

* * *

I was unfair to Ellis on one point. For him to say that there was probably nothing that could be done by the Founders to fix America’s racial problems was an important conservative statement; but in order to say it, he needed to throw in the “racist” word to cover himself. If he had said, without the prefatory remark that the Founders were “racist,” that there was probably nothing the Founders could have done to fix America’s racial problem, that would have been seen by his audience as a racist justification for all of America’s racial inequalities. Ellis has an admirable talent for saying shockingly conservative things in a way that doesn’t get him attacked by liberals, and this was an example of that.

__________

Note: Washington’s many writings, letters, and official pronouncements on the subject demonstrate that he strongly believed in the God of the Bible, whom he called Providence. The fact that Washington rarely or never said anything about Jesus Christ may mean that he was not a convinced believer in Christ. But, even if that were the case, it would not make him a deist. Here is an earlier discussion in 2006 of the Novaks’ view of Washington, which I wrote before I read their book, and where I said that Washington was a deist in a sense, but was much more than a deist given his ardent addresses to God. The key thing the Novaks’ book brings out, which I hadn’t taken in at the time I wrote the earlier entry, is that a man who believes in a personal God who responds to our prayers, and who, moreover, repeatedly calls on his countrymen to pray to God to remove their sins and to bring his blessings upon them, is not a deist, period.

- end of initial entry -

David B. writes:

You describe Ellis as having a giggling, unserious, manner and not believing in anything. I remember news reports in 2001 about Ellis lying about his military record. He claimed to have been in Vietnam. Actually, he was in uniform, but never left the United States. For details, see the Wikipedia entry on Joseph Ellis.

Terry Morris writes:

“To say that America was not a Christian country, because the Constitution says nothing about Christianity, is simply fallacious.”

Indeed. That makes about as much sense as saying that the United States is not secular because the Constitution says nothing of it being secular. But the Constitution says more about the religious nature of the States than it does of their secular nature in Article VII, if Ellis wants to get technical about it. And if he needs a lesson on who the framers were referring to when they said “In the year of our Lord,” I know several people that can help him out with that.

It seems as good a time as any to bring up the point that Michael Savage made in his recent outburst which you wrote about. Savage said something to the effect of “what kind of sense does it make for a people that worships the U.S. Constitution, to allow Muslims into our country…” I would answer Savage by saying that it makes all kinds of sense if, as he says (and I think his statement may be correct; it’s at least much more correct than it once was), the people of the United States “worship” the Constitution to the extent that they consider it, as Ellis apparently does, to be the last word on what defines the United States and the American People—a secular nation which is no respecter of religions.

John Hagan writes:

Here is some more information about Ellis concerning other lies such as his phony exploits in the civil rights movement, and that he helped write David Halberstram’s “The Best and the Brightest”, something I was not aware of.

Charles G. writes:

Joseph Ellis simply cannot be trusted. To understand, recall his role in the Jefferson/Hemings controversy, then read this article at Wikipedia in its entirety…

LA replies:

While Ellis’s Vietnam claim is most strange, my understanding was that he was suspended from a year from his teaching job, and that nothing else of a fraudulent nature was found in his writings.

As for the Hemings matter, while I’ve not agreed with everything Ellis has said, I’m not aware that he has done anything dishonorable. In American Sphinx (1996) he had disagreed with the Hemings claim, then when the DNA information about Sally’s youngest son Easton was brought forward a couple of years later, he changed his view and said that he thought Jefferson was involved with Sally. I thought at the time that that was overstated, as the DNA pointed to any male on that side of Jefferson’s family, not Jefferson himself. So I disagreed with Ellis’s complete change of position. However, more recently it seems that further research has precluded other Jefferson male relatives being at Monticello at the times when Sally’s babies were conceived, and Myron Magnet of the City Journal recently said summarily that new evidence shows Jefferson was the father of all of Sally’s children. However Magnet did not cite anything to back this up.

Jack W. writes:

Jefferson is the one big source for atheists asserting that America was conceived as a secular society. Unfortunately this nation’s founders allowed Thomas Jefferson to lock himself in a room, away from all eyes, to principally compose The Declaration of Independence. He was a child of The Enlightenment, absorbing all of its secular logic and atheistic rationalism. He did his best to minimize the Christian foundation of this country that stemmed from the first settlers and original colonies.

From a writer’s perspective, it was his intent to pen a document that killed any religious intent. In fact he was a master editor of texts as shown in his butchering of the gospels. In his letters to others, he mercilessly disparaged Christianity. It is our misfortune that the other founders allowed him to design and define a document thus betraying the founding society. There is nothing sacred about a “founder” such as Jefferson—he is the serpent in the garden.

Since that time, Jefferson has become the source for envisioning and re-imagining America as a secular society (e.g. Dershowitz’s book “Blasphemy” which cites Jefferson voluminously). It is not farfetched to assert that this snake had sexual relations with slaves and sired bastard children. Having attacked Christianity (sometimes even more vociferously than Paine), one can see where Christian morality meant little to him. His sexual morality was no doubt in keeping with those of the French intellectual salons he admired (along with Franklin).

Too bad that Washington hadn’t kept an eye on his writing effort… What we have today in the US is precisely Jeffersonian Democracy with the destruction of morality and any commitment to God by this nation. Thank you Thomas Jefferson, a poisonous stream from a venomous pen. And please don’t defend this lizard as if there is something sacred because he happened to be there at the beginning. Satan was also there at the point of origin defining and arguing from his perspective of rationality!

LA replies:

Jack W.’s comment is typical of the Jefferson hatred that has existed since the Federalists in the 1790s went over the top in their attacks on him (and destroyed themselves in the process) until today. There is much for which Jefferson deserves condemnation, for example, his dishonest and vicious behavior toward Washington, which James Thomas Flexner recounts in detail in the fourth of volume of his Washington biography. But to turn Jefferson into a demon, into the devil himself, to portray him in animalistic terms (“this snake”), is not right and destroys people’s ability to understand American history.

“Jefferson is the one big source for atheists asserting that America was conceived as a secular society.”

This is true.

“allowed Thomas Jefferson to lock himself in a room, away from all eyes”

This is a false picture. Jefferson was a member of the Second Continental Congress, assigned to write the draft for the Declaration. The Congress then made numerous changes in the document and adopted it. If there had been anything in his draft they disapproved of, they would have removed it. The document is thus the collective work of the Congress, not the sole work of Jefferson.

“In his letters to others, he mercilessly disparaged Christianity.”

That seems an overstatement to me. Jefferson was not a Christian and was always open and honest about this in his writings. I don’t remember seeing letters in which he “mercilessly disparaged” Christianity.

My bottom line: whatever we think about Jefferson, his secular-democratic vision, his idea that if people were just left alone they would behave virtuously and harmoniously, has been one of the central threads of the American mind and character from the start. Demonizing Jefferson as a person is not going to help us understand this aspect of America or resist it. The key to understanding Jefferson is in Ellis’s American Sphinx, a book I cannot recommend highly enough. Jefferson has always been described as impossible to understand. I always found him impossible to understand. Ellis makes him understandable—and does so in a very concise manner He gets at the central thoughts and beliefs that animated Jefferson throughout his life.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 24, 2007 12:10 PM | Send