Wood reminded us why America is special, different

As the nation approaches its 250th birthday, many of us will ponder what makes the United States of America special. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Gordon Wood can help.

Wood won’t see July 4. He died this month at age 92 after being struck by a car in a supermarket parking lot.

Yet his insights can enlighten us on Independence Day and beyond.

Wood spoke with me in 2007 about his book “Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different.” It opened with this claim:  “No other major nation honors its past historical characters, especially characters who existed two centuries ago, in quite the manner that we Americans do.”

“I think it has to do with our sense of identity,” Wood told me. “We’re not a nation in the ordinary sense of the term. We don’t go back to time immemorial. To be a Brit is to be somebody who they recognize themselves as British, or the French. We’re a nation of immigrants, and as a consequence, we need to have something else to hold us together.”

“I think the values and the institutions that this generation of revolutionary characters created gives us our sense of identity, and that’s why we go back to them, to reaffirm and refresh ourselves, to reaffirm our values, our ideas of liberty, equality, constitutionalism,” he continued. “That’s what holds us together — these ideas. We’re not a nation in the usual sense of the term. To be an American is not to be somebody, but to believe in something.”

Wood wrote that “Washington was truly a great man and the greatest president we ever had.”

“First of all, he’s the first, and that put a tremendous load on him,” the historian explained to me. “He really had a responsibility that no other president, even Lincoln, has ever quite had, and I think all by himself he held the nation together at a time when it could have easily fallen apart.”

“But he’s also great because of the way he acted at the end of the war, when he gave up his sword, surrendered his sword to the Congress and went back to Mount Vernon,” Wood explained. “That was a magnificent act. It electrified the world because no general in modern times, or even going back to Caesar, had ever done such a thing. They all expected political rewards commensurate with their military achievements, but not Washington.”

Turning to the third president, “no one has embodied America’s democratic ideals and democratic hopes more than Thomas Jefferson,” Wood wrote.

Why? “Well, because of the ‘all men are created equal,’” the author explained in 2007. “Lincoln made a great deal of that, and it’s been used by Martin Luther King, and every successive generation has looked back to Jefferson as the source of equality, which is I think by far the most powerful ideological force in American history, the sense that we’re all at some level basically equal.”

Wood also assessed Broadway’s favorite founder. Alexander Hamilton was “nothing if not a hard-headed realist,” the historian wrote.

“He disliked the utopianism of people like Jefferson who he thought were pie-in-the-sky dreamers,” Wood told me. “He is the realist. He’s the hard-headed financial genius, and he had an image of America that we would be a great military fiscal state that could take on the European states on their own terms, something that Jefferson and Madison never shared. They didn’t want that kind of strong military state. But that’s the kind of state we’ve become, so Hamilton’s vision has been fulfilled, you might say.”

Wood believed the growth of egalitarian democracy ensured we never would see another generation like the Founders.

“Democracy demands a different kind of leadership, and that’s one of the prices we’ve paid for democracy,” he told me. “That’s why we shouldn’t look back nostalgically to these men. They were aristocrats, and they created the sources of their own demise by creating a democratic society.”

Yet they deserve our attention, Wood added.

“I think we should still look back to their values and the institutions they created,” he said. “Yes, I think that’s the source of our strength. That’s the source of our identity. That’s the source of our unity. We can’t count on McDonald’s and Starbucks to hold us together. The only things we have in common are these ideals that they voiced and articulated.”

Thanks to Wood, we all know more about the nation’s 250-year commitment to liberty, equality, and constitutionalism. For that, he deserves his own place in American history.

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.

“Wood reminded us why America is special, different” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.