Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (2 page)

R
alph Ketchum
sits on the porch of his little house tucked away on a dirt lane that runs down toward a lake, pouring soda for his guest and listening to the thrum of the rain on his roof. He has been talking to a visitor about the great subject of his academic life—James Madison, the diminutive hypochondriac from Virginia who, in 1787, overthrew the U.S. government and did so simply by being smarter than everyone else. American popular history seems at this point to have devolved into a Founding Father of the Month Club, with several huge books on Alexander Hamilton selling briskly, an almost limitless fascination with Thomas Jefferson, a steady stream of folks spelunking through George Washington’s psyche, and an HBO project starring the Academy Award winner Paul Giamatti as that impossible old blatherskite John Adams. But Madison, it seems, has been abandoned by filmmakers and by the writers of lushly footnoted doorstops. He also was a mediocre president; this never translates well to the screen, where all presidents are great men.

“There are two things that make Jefferson superior to Madison in the historical memory,” says Ketchum. “One was Jefferson’s magnetism in small groups and the other was his gift for the eloquent phrase. Madison has always been a trailer in that way because, well, he writes perfectly well and, occasionally, manages some eloquence. Occasionally.”

Madison was not a social lion. In large gatherings, Ketchum writes, people often found him “stiff, reserved, cold, even aloof and supercilious.” He relaxed only in small settings, among people he knew, and while discussing issues of which he felt he had command. “He therefore seldom made a good first impression,” writes Ketchum, “seldom overawed a legislative body at his first appearance, and seldom figured in the spicy or dramatic events of which gossip and headlines are made.” Madison thought, is what he did, and thinking makes very bad television.

However, for all his shyness and lack of inherent charisma, Madison did manage to woo and win Dolley Payne Todd, the most eligible widow of the time. Ketchum points out that the Virginian came calling having decked himself out in a new beaver hat. (The introductions were made by none other than Aaron Burr, who certainly did get around. If you’re keeping score, this means that Burr is responsible for the marriage of one of the authors of the
Federalist
and the death of another, having subsequently introduced Alexander Hamilton to a bullet in Weehawken.) “He did win Dolley.” Ketchum smiles. “He had to have something going for him there.”

Ketchum’s fascination with Madison began in graduate school at the University of Chicago. His mentor, the historian Stuart Brown, encouraged Ketchum to do his doctoral dissertation on Madison’s political philosophy. Ketchum finished the dissertation in 1956. He also spent four years working as an editor of Madison’s papers at the University of Chicago. He began
work on his massive biography of Madison in the mid-1960s and didn’t finish the book until 1971.

“Partly,” Ketchum says, “the hook was through my mentor, Stuart Brown, and I think I absorbed his enthusiasm, which was for the founding period in general. He said that he thought Madison had been neglected—my wife calls him ‘the Charlie Brown of the Founding Fathers’—and that he was more important, so that set me to work on him.”

Madison was always the guy under the hood, tinkering with the invention he’d helped to devise in Philadelphia, when he improved the Articles of Confederation out of existence. “You can see that in the correspondence between them”—Jefferson and Madison. “Madison was always toning Jefferson down a little bit. Henry Clay said that Jefferson had more genius but that Madison had better judgment—that Jefferson was more brilliant, but that Madison was more profound.”

We are at a dead level time in the dreary summer of 2007. A war of dubious origins and uncertain goals is dragging on despite the fact that a full 70 percent of the people in the country don’t want it to do so. Politics is beginning to gather itself into an election season in which the price of a candidate’s haircuts will be as important for a time as his position on the war. The country is entertained, but not engaged. It is drowning in information and thirsty for knowledge. There have been seven years of empty debate, of deliberate inexpertise, of abandoned rigor, of lazy, pulpy tolerance for risible ideas simply because they sell, or because enough people believe in them devoutly enough to raise a clamor that can be heard over the deadening drone that suffuses everything else. The drift is as palpable as the rain in the trees, and it comes from willful and deliberate neglect. Madison believed in self-government in all things, not merely in our politics. He did not believe in drift. “A popular government,” he
famously wrote, “without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a tragedy or a Farce, or perhaps both.” The great flaw, of course, is that, even given the means to acquire information, the people of the country may decline. Drift is willed into being.

“I think we are nowhere near the citizens he would want us to be,” Ketchum muses. “It was kind of an idealism in Madison’s view that we can do better than that, but it depends, fundamentally, on improving the quality of the parts, the citizens. I think he would be very discouraged.”

Madison is an imperfect guide, as all of them are, even the ones that have television movies made about them. When they launched the country, they really had no idea where all they were doing might lead. They launched more than a political experiment. They set free a spirit by which every idea, no matter how howlingly mad, can be heard. There is more than a little evidence that they meant this spirit to go far beyond the political institutions of a free government. They saw Americans—white male ones, anyway—as a different kind of people from any that had come before. They believed that they had created a space of the mind as vast as the new continent onto which fate, ambition, greed, and religious persecution had dropped them, and just as wild. They managed to set freedom itself free.

Madison himself dropped a hint in
Federalist
14. “Is it not the glory of the people of America,” he wrote, “that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?”

Granted, he was at the time arguing against the notion that a republic could not flourish if it got too big or its population
got too large. But you also can see in his question the seedbed of a culture that inevitably would lead, not only to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, but to William Faulkner, Jackson Pollock, and Little Richard. A culture that moves and evolves and absorbs the new. Experiment, the founders told us. There’s plenty of room here for new ideas, and no idea is too crazy to be tested.

EARLY
on the sparkling morning, the golf carts, newly washed, sit gleaming in a row along one side of the parking lot. There’s a faint and distant click, the sound of the day’s first drives being launched down the shining fairways. Inside the clubhouse of the small public course along Route 61 just outside Minneapolis, two elderly gentlemen are just sitting down for breakfast when someone comes in and asks them if they know how to get to the old lost town. They think for a minute; then one of them rises and points out the window, past the dripping golf carts and off down Route 61, where the winding road runs toward the Mississippi River.

“As I recall,” he says, “when my grandfather took me out there when I was a kid, it was down that way, right on the river-bank. It’s all grown over now, though, I think.”

A dream lies buried in the lush growth that has sprung up on the banks of the great river. In 1856, a dreamer built a city here; the city failed, but the crank went on. He went into politics. He went off to Congress. He came home and he farmed on what was left of the land from his city, and he read. Oh, Lord, how he read. He read so much that he rediscovered Atlantis. He read so much that he discovered how the earth was formed of the cosmic deposits left by comets. He read so much that he found a
code in Shakespeare’s plays proving that their author was Francis Bacon. His endless, grinding research was thorough, careful, and absolutely, utterly wrong. “It is so oftentimes in this world,” he lamented to his diary in 1881, “that it is not the philosophy that is at fault, but the facts.” They called him the Prince of Cranks.

Ignatius Donnelly was born in Philadelphia, the son of a doctor and a pawnbroker. He received a proper formal education, and after high school found a job as a clerk in the law office of Benjamin Brewster. But the law bored him. He felt a stirring in his literary soul; in 1850, his poem “The Mourner’s Vision” was published. It’s a heartfelt, if substantially overcooked, appeal to his countrymen to resist the repressive measures through which the European governments had squashed the revolutions of 1848. Donnelly wrote:

As one historian gently put it, the poem “was not critically acclaimed.”

Donnelly also involved himself in Philadelphia’s various fraternal and professional organizations, as well as in its tumultuous Democratic politics. By 1855, he’d developed a sufficient
reputation for oratory that he was chosen to deliver the Fourth of July address at the local county Democratic convention in Independence Square.

However, for the first—but far from the last—time in his life, Donnelly’s political gyroscope now came peculiarly unstuck. Within a year of giving the address, he’d pulled out of a race for the Pennsylvania state legislature and endorsed his putative opponent, a Whig. The next year, he again declared himself a Democrat and threw himself into James Buchanan’s presidential campaign. Buchanan got elected; not long afterward, Donnelly announced that he was a Republican.

By now, too, he was chafing at the limits of being merely one Philadelphia lawyer in a city of thousands of them, many of whom had the built-in advantages of money and social connections that gave them a permanent head start. He’d married Katherine McCaffrey, a young school principal with a beautiful singing voice, in 1855. He wanted to be rich and famous. Philadelphia seemed both too crowded a place to make a fortune and too large a place in which to become famous. And, besides, his mother and his wife hated each other. (They would not speak for almost fifteen years.) He was ready to move. Not long after he was married, Donnelly met a man named John Nininger, and Nininger had a proposition for him.