Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies)

by Thomas A. Foster

  ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

  Colin R.Johnson, Just Queer Folks:

  Gender and Sexuality in Rural America

  Lisa Sigel, Making Modern Love:

  Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain

  The American Quest for a Relatable Past

  THOMAS A.FOSTER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION: REMEMBERING THE FOUNDERS: SEX AND THE AMERICAN QUEST FOR A RELATABLE PAST

  1 GEORGE WASHINGTON

  2 THOMAS JEFFERSON

  3 JOHN ADAMS

  4 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  5 ALEXANDER HAMILTON

  6 GOUVERNEUR MORRIS

  CONCLUSION

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  LTHOUGH MY NAME ALONE appears on the cover of this book, I could never have written this volume without the time and effort that were contributed by a humblingly large number of people. What follows is my acknowledgment of a mere portion of the help I received. The earliest idea for the book came from conversations with John D'Emilio, to whom I am most grateful for his mentoring and encouragement. The support and guidance of Mary Beth Norton have sustained me throughout not only this project but also my career.

  A long list of individuals generously contributed in various ways, providing important feedback, reading drafts, and writing letters for grant applications. I especially thank Lauren Berlant, Frances Clarke, John D'Emilio, Toby Ditz, Carolyn Eastman, Estelle Freedman, Francois Furstenberg, Lori Glover, Annette Gordon-Reed, Nancy Isenberg, James E.McWilliams, Robin Mitchell, Rebecca Plant, Elizabeth Reis, Lisa Sigel, Roshanna Sylvester, David Waldstreicher, and-for making a trip to Mt. Vernon so enjoyable-Wayne Wheeler. I am also grateful to Jordan Stein, who provided timely, insightful, and encouraging words at a very critical point.

  I thank Dr. Gerard Gawalt, in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, who granted me access to Gouverneur Morris's original diaries. Numerous other individuals helped me understand Morris's world, including Dena Goodman, Catherine Kudlick, Jeffery Merrick, Melanie Miller, and Ben Mutschler.

  I am grateful to Marello Harris for his initial research at the University of Georgia; to Ramiro Hernandez and Katarzyna Szymanska for their help with various projects; and to DePaul University's College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Undergraduate Research Assistant program for supporting the labor of Sandra Sasal, Zachary Stafford, and Katie Suleta. DePaul University has provided me with not only a reliable livelihood but also supportive colleagues and engaging students. I received additional financial support from DePaul in the form of a DePaul Summer Research Grant, a fellowship at the DePaul Humanities Center, a Competitive Research Grant, and travel funding.

  As the book took shape, it benefited from the feedback and support of a small army of editors, peer reviewers, and even potential agents-but especially Debbie Gershenowitz, Gayatri Patnaik, and Janet Francedese and the team at Temple University Press.

  Over the years, I honed my arguments and gained new understanding from the responses of audiences at the Gerber-Hart Library, the University of Northern Iowa, Purdue University at Calumet, and the University of Mary Washington. I was also fortunate to have the opportunity to discuss the work at a number of conferences, including the American Men's Studies Association Annual Conference, Creating the Past: Early American Museums between History and Edu-entertainment, the European Early American Studies Association Biennial Conference, the Newberry Seminar on Women and Gender, Queering Paradigms IV, and (Re)Figuring Sex: Somatechnical (Re)Visions.

  Finally, I express my gratitude to New York University Press, Disability Studies Quarterly, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the corresponding anonymous peer reviewers, who provided useful feedback on portions of this project that I developed into essays published in these academic journals and in an edited volume published by New York University Press.

  Sex and the American Quest for a Relatable Past

  IVING AS WE DO in an era in which public figures are subjected to extreme scrutiny in the form of media intrusions, we tend to think of our interest in reconciling public images with private sexual conduct as uniquely postmodern. In fact, Americans have long invested national heroes with superior moral status and at the same time probed into their private lives. If the Founding Fathers seem remote to us now, that distance persists despite the efforts of generations of biographers who attempt to take their measure as leaders and tell us what they were really like in their most intimate relationships. From the early years of the Republic till now, biographers have attempted to burnish the Founders' images and satisfy public curiosity about their lives beyond public view. At the same time, gossips and politically motivated detractors, claiming to have the inside track on new information, have circulated scandalous or unpleasant stories to knock these exalted men off their pedestals. Looking back at the stories and assessments that have proliferated in the two and a half centuries since the Founders' generation, we see the dual nature of these accounts and how they oscillate between the public and the private, between the idealized image and actions in the intimate realm. We see how each generation reshapes images of the Founders to fit that storyteller's era.

  On the one hand, the Founders appear desexualized. The images of the Founding Fathers that we regularly encounter-as heads on money, as reference points in discussions about political ideology, and as monuments at tourist sites-assert their status as virtuous American men. They typically appear either disembodied-as heads or busts-or in clothing that reminds us of their political or military position. Their flesh is covered from neck to wrists, with only hands and face exposed. Typically, the men are frozen in advanced age-generally gray-haired, if not topped off with wigs-further confirming their identities as desexualized elder statesman for generations of Americans who associate sexual activity with youth.'

  On the other side of the coin, curiosity about their "real" lives has continued seemingly unabated into our own time. In 1810, Mason L. (Parson) Weems, originator of the cherry-tree myth, emphasized the importance of discussing George Washington's personal life. Weems argues that "public character" is no "evidence of true greatness" and calls for a spotlight to be shined on his "private life." Weems gives the compelling example of Benedict Arnold, who could "play you the great man" "yet in the private walks of life" reveal himself to be a "swindler"-including not only his political deception but his use of the "aid of loose women." For Weems, the Founders' intimate relationships should not be off-limits for Americans: "It is not, then, in the glare of public, but in the shade of private life, that we are to look for the man. Private life is always real life." To truly know them, their conduct in that realm is an important piece of the puzzle.'

  By tracing how intimacy has figured in popular memory of the Founders from their own lifetimes to the recent past, Sex and the Founding Fathers shows that sex has long been used to define their masculine character and political authority and has always figured in civic and national identity.' Each generation has asked different questions about the Founders and their private lives, but Americans have consistently imagined and reimagined the private lives of the Founders through the lens of contemporary society. As Michael Kammen and others have argued, countries "reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them" and "do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind."4 Gore Vidal has referred to our selective national memory as "The United States of Amnesia."5 It is true that we tend to embrace the national narratives that
we desire and "forget" those that we prefer to hide away. Stories about the Founders' lives have always been told in ways that make use of the norms and ideals of the time period. Founders can never be embraced in their late-eighteenth-century context, for, as the saying goes, the past is a foreign country-and the Founders lose their cultural utility when viewed as foreigners. Americans want to see themselves in their images, because these men, the men who created America, are by their actions the embodiment of the nation and of our national identity.

  Scholars have shown how the Founding Fathers have been central to our sense of national identity. The Founders created the nation and can never be divorced from our understanding of it. They embody the nation, its principles, and even its founding documents. In this sense, they are unchanging and can always serve to connect Americans with American identity.' Today, the Founders generate both vast book sales and daily reference by politicians, jurists interpreting the Constitution, schoolteachers, and ordinary citizens-each of whom holds up the Founders' historical significance because of their roles in establishing the political structure of the nation and in shaping our national identity? By examining how their most intimate thoughts and actions figure in popular imagining of the Founders, we are able to deepen our understanding of how sexuality and gender are important components of civic and national identity.

  Today, Americans still trade in stories about the sexual escapades of the Founding Fathers. The topic is often used to draw a contrast between distinct private and public worlds.' Consider the following examples. A farcical article, written in the straight-faced style of The Onion, reports on the recent discovery of raunchy letters written by Washington to a woman he desired; 9 the article is accompanied by a lurid portrait of Washington with a grotesquely large bulge in his pants. A popular author visits The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote his recent book on Thomas Jefferson: "It's a book about our founding fathers as if they had penises," he tells the audience. "Most founding-father books omit the cock. I put it in."10 Such self-consciously irreverent cultural expressions draw on the assumption that the authors are making a compelling contrast by placing that which is sexless (historic, public, proper) alongside open sexuality (modern, private, crude). They rely on a particular notion of the Founders as popularly repressed and mock our culture for denying them, and all Americans, their sexuality.

  Some authors have focused entire studies on the intimate lives of the Founders." Journalist Thomas Fleming has published a collection of biographies on the "intimate lives" of the Founding Fathers as a way to personalize them for a modern audience." But he is certainly not the first to do so. Historian Charles Tansill published his book on the romantic lives of the Founders in 1964, basing it upon lectures he gave to his students as a way to "humanize" the political leaders of the American Revolution. Others have included chapters on the Founders in their books on the "sex lives" of the American presidents.13 Hustler publisher Larry Flynt has teamed up with historian David Eisenbach to write a book that argues that the presidents' sex lives have, in fact, shaped the development of the nation. Management con sultant Wesley 0. Hagood has written a book on the sex lives of presidents in part to contextualize President Bill Clinton's impeachment trial. Michael Farquhar has similarly written his best-selling collection of "American scandals" in part so that "the first three centuries of American scandal" could "put a little perspective on the relatively minor sins of recent memory.""

  Many Americans are already familiar with anecdotes about the Revolutionary War era's leaders' sex lives precisely because they are the topic of a long-running discussion. To provide two immediate examples, Jefferson's long affair with Sally Herrings and Benjamin Franklin's "flirtation" with Parisian ladies during his tenure as diplomat continue to fascinate. At the time of the nation's founding, political enemies used such information to smear the Founders' characters. In cultural memory, many Americans use such stories to emphasize the flaws, foibles, or vanities that make the Founders more fully three-dimensional and relatable.

  Recent studies have shown that Americans today embrace history but "reject nation-centered accounts" that do not allow them to "build bridges between personal pasts and larger historical stories." Americans want to "personalize the public past."" As Lois W.Banner points out, the lives of the Founders "have become sounding boards for what the nation thinks of itself."" The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, just steps away from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, promotes this kind of personal connection in an online eleven-question quiz titled "Which Founder Are You?" The landing page for the website declares that the Founders had "many different personalities" and encourages the Web surfer to "Discover which Founding Father you're most like!" I7

  Every generation likes to say that it has finally learned the truth about the Founders and that by examining their private lives, their loves, and their desires, it has exposed the real men. With few exceptions, revelations do not come from the discovery of new documents. The "breaking news" that authors like to assert is most often based on (sometimes) novel interpretations of familiar sources, the diaries and letters that we have regarding the Founders' loves, families, and marriages. More often, new interpretations are possible because of gaps in the record that conveniently have lent themselves to readings that suit generation after generation of Americans seeking themselves in their Founders. In general, academic historians are rigidly tied to the rule that claims must be directly supported by existing documentation that is analyzed by understanding the historical context in which it was produced. Academic historians are more accepting of the fact that history is full of unanswerable questions, of nuanced and contradictory settings, and of holes in the record. In contrast, popular biographers and filmmakers are often compelled by their respective media to fill in those gaps.

  By proffering new readings of old men, popular biographers are, of course, able to create straw men that allow them to sell their books as something fresh-but more than just this strategy is at work here. By claiming to lift the veil for the first time on the private life of a Founder, they enable us to feel that we are getting closer to the perceived truth about ourselves and the nation. And by believing that the private man is being revealed for the first time, readers can see themselves as modern, having made a true break from the past. Sex is central to this understanding of modernity, as is evidenced by our understanding of modern sexuality as being somehow more liberated than the sexuality of previous times."

  Museums and popular biographers, if pressed, might concede that they use sex opportunistically; a titillating message draws in a wider public for the real history that they want to teach. In my view, the role of sex in history should not be so easily dismissed. The element of sex heightens interest in the histories of the Founders because learning about their intimate lives also personalizes abstract notions of political citizenship and connects Americans to their nation and their own identity as Americans. Current stories increasingly use sexual personalizing of the Founders not simply because sex is more openly displayed in the media but because Americans increasingly need to know what is American and see themselves in that definition. Many Americans get that reassurance from the Founders.

  To understand how popular memory takes shape, this book makes use of a wide range of materials, including print sources, such as books, magazines, newspapers, poetry, published songs, eulogies, cartoons, and caricatures, as well as portraits, statues, memorials, popular films, musicals, websites, and museum exhibits." Because of their immense popularity in the past and today, popular biographies are also an ideal source for looking at changing ideas about sex and the Founding Fathers, and they make up the core of the book. Throughout American history, biographies have remained the most important source for communicating to Americans information about the personal lives of the Founding Fathers. "Phenomenally popular" in nineteenth-century America, biographies were "regarded as a method of moral teaching."20 Today, exposure to biographies is still one of the main ways that mo
st Americans learn about history.21 In contrast to academic histories written to shed light on the past on its own terms, popular biographies are usually written with an eye toward showing how a life story can resonate with present concerns. These "life stories" can tell us a great deal about the cul rural moments that produce them. Together, all these sources, through their circulation and as products of the thinking of their time, both popularize and reflect understandings of sex and masculinity.

  We can recognize the contours of the history of sexuality in America in the chapters that follow.22 Each chapter begins with an examination of public discussion of the personal lives of the Founders while they lived. The Founders often cultivated their own public reputations around sexuality in response to cultural norms of the day. In the personally charged political climate of the early Republic, the press operated in what today would be considered a tabloid style, making hefty use of rumor and innuendo and relying on the public's thirst for sordid details and voyeuristic thrills. This approach meshed well with political standards of the day, which, as Nancy Isenberg reminds us, indicated that "political figures were expected to virtually embody the well-defined traits of republican virtue in their personal and public demeanor, speech, and lifestyle."23 The sexually charged, scandalmongering political climate of the American Revolution and early Republic also generated public discussion about personal lives. Americans did not exempt the Founders from this examination, discussing Jefferson as a slaveowner who indulged in intimacy with enslaved adolescent Herrings, Alexander Hamilton as a repentant adulterer, and John Adams as a prickly prude.

  As the Founders passed from life into memory, their public reputations lay entirely in the hands of Americans. The sexualized political climate of the early Republic waned. By the nineteenth century, public memory of the Founders struggled to reconcile Victorian modes of sexual morality with the elite sexual cultures from which the Founders came. The earliest biographies written about the Founders seek to establish a permanent respectability for the individual political leaders of the Revolution and nation's founding. In the hands of biographers, many of the Founders serve as role models for American boys and men. To accomplish this goal, of course, life details are handled carefully, because many of today's most revered Founders suffered from early scandalous reputations: Franklin was branded as immoral, abolitionists labeled Jefferson a child rapist, and Gouverneur Morris's private life had to be whitewashed for Victorian audiences.