by Sarah Vowell
Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the wisest among them, remarked, “When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.”
They debated whether there should be one president or an executive committee of three, then about the length of a presidential term—four years or seven? They discussed how bad laws could be overturned, and if by presidential veto, then the king fearers had to figure out how to override said veto. They squabbled about how the lower house of the bicameral legislature should be allocated, and if by population, do slaves count? And if they count, could they count less? And if so, can we not use the actual ugly word? So how’s about we refer to them as wink-wink “other persons”?
As piano player Bill Evans once described what it was like to improvise with Miles Davis, the framers muddled through “the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking.”
In the end, thirty-nine out of fifty-five delegates agreed to sign it even though, as Franklin pointed out, expressing the misgivings of every man in the room, “there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve.” However, Franklin made Washington’s chair famous when he mentioned that, during the months of squabbling, he had often stared at the sun carved on the back of the chair and wondered whether it was rising or setting—which is to say, whether this was the beginning of a new republic or the end of a failed coalition. “But now,” he concluded, once the document was ready to send to the states for ratification (and further disagreements), “I have the happiness to know it is a rising, and not a setting sun.”
That cheerful parable turned a stick of furniture into a classic symbol of American optimism.
Bill Clinton trotted out Franklin’s anecdote at the end of his final State of the Union address in 2000. “Today,” he proclaimed, “because each succeeding generation of Americans has kept the fire of freedom burning brightly . . . we all still bask in the glow and the warmth of Mr. Franklin’s rising sun.”
Sounds good. Yet I was following in Lafayette’s footsteps in the fall of 2013 in the middle of one of the most spiteful congressional budget spats of all time. A faction led by first-term Texas senator Ted Cruz, a member of the ultraconservative Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, refused to pass routine appropriations legislation to fund the federal government in the approaching fiscal year until their colleagues agreed to either delay or repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, a law meant to make health insurance more affordable and available to more citizens (or a big government socialist conspiracy to jack up the national debt and kill small businesses and/or old people, depending on who was describing it).
Because of the lawmakers’ inability to come to an agreement, the federal government was forced to shut down all nonessential government operations, including battlefields and monuments administered by the nonessential (to them but not to me) National Park Service.
It was around that time that Republican congressman Pete Sessions, another Texan, was asked about the possibility of compromising with Democrats on a budget deal that would reopen government services. Good thing Lafayette was too dead to hear his answer. “We’re not French,” Sessions said. “We don’t surrender.”
That was when I came to the conclusion that the takeaway from Benjamin Franklin’s story about the carving on Washington’s chair was not the forecast of a sunny future but rather Franklin’s months of wondering if negotiations would collapse. That, to me, is the quintessential experience of living in the United States: constantly worrying whether or not the country is about to fall apart.
It was irritating being kept in suspense about how long the congressional tiff would keep nonessential park rangers from helping me do my even less essential job. I cannot imagine how a Lakota domestic violence victim—turned away from the shuttered women’s shelter on her reservation because its federal funding ran out—would interpret the wood carving on Washington’s chair, but I’m guessing she would have more pressing concerns.
I wish that the founders had had the foresight to hang on to and enshrine another one of Independence Hall’s chairs, the one that Benjamin Rush mentioned in a letter to John Adams about how Thomas Jefferson objected when his colleagues in the Continental Congress considered organizing a fast day, which Jefferson pooh-poohed as too religious. Rush reminded Adams, “You rose and defended the motion, and in reply to Mr. Jefferson’s objections to Christianity you said you were sorry to hear such sentiments from a gentleman whom you so highly respected and with whom you agreed upon so many subjects, and that it was the only instance you had ever known of a man of sound sense and real genius that was an enemy to Christianity. You suspected, you told me, that you had offended him, but that he soon convinced you to the contrary by crossing the room and taking a seat in the chair next to you.”
Who knows what happened to that particular chair. It could have burned during the British occupation of Philadelphia in the winter of 1777–78, when firewood was scarce. But it might have been a more helpful, sobering symbolic object than that chair with the rising sun. Then perhaps citizens making pilgrimages to Independence Hall could file past the chair Jefferson walked across an aisle to sit in, and we could all ponder the amount of respect, affection, and wishy-washy give-and-take needed to keep a house divided in reasonable repair.
Months before the shutdown, I had purchased nonrefundable plane tickets to Virginia so my twin sister, Amy, and I could take her thirteen-year-old son, Owen, to Colonial Williamsburg, Jefferson’s Monticello, and Yorktown, where we planned to ponder the revolution’s high-water mark of Franco-American cooperation. Once we got down there, the shutdown was in full swing. I fretted over whether Congress would engage in enough American-American cooperation to let the National Park Service reopen Yorktown Battlefield in time for Yorktown Day, the anniversary of the British surrender to the Americans and the French.
At Montpelier, the (privately run and therefore open) Virginia home of the Constitution’s architect, James Madison, I nervously clicked on the news on my phone every few minutes, hoping for a deal that would reopen Colonial National Historical Park. Filing past the cardboard cutout of Lafayette seated in the mansion’s fancy dining room, I couldn’t help wondering if the separation of powers inscribed in Madison’s brainchild were meant to arouse quite so much separation.
To my relief, the shutdown finally ended a couple of days before the Yorktown Day commemorations commenced. And at the Franco-American hootenanny put on by the town, it was downright poignant when the French visitors who were there to remember the French blood spilled in Virginia fields and Chesapeake waters sang their own super-violent national anthem composed during their own gory revolution.
“They should have sung that angry-men song from Les Miz,” said the nephew, a thespian who was missing rehearsals for his teen theater company’s production of Singin’ in the Rain to join me in Virginia.
“Actually, that song is set during the Paris Uprising of 1832,” I told him.
“‘Actually, that song is set during the Paris Uprising of 1832,’” he repeated back to me in a snotty egghead voice.
I can’t really blame the kid for confusing a later French rebellion with the official French Revolution of 1789, because France had so many brutal hiccups after that, yo-yoing from republic back to monarchy to the so-called republics of Napoleon and his heirs with the odd riotous bloodbath in between. Which is why the French citizens who showed up at the Yorktown festivities and sang “La Marseillaise” refer to their current government as the Fifth Republic.
Revolutionary France was no place for a moderate like Lafayette, whose rough draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was written as a preamble for a new constitution in the constitutional monarchy he hoped to establish, with the king as a figurehead—wi
th a head. But when he proclaimed to the French people, “All men are created free and equal” with “certain unalienable rights,” including “the right to hold and express opinions,” every commoner and guttersnipe believed him. And so instead of spending the early days of the revolution luxuriating in high-minded Independence Hall–style constitutional debates, Lafayette had to keep riding his horse around Paris, frantically trying to talk ferocious crowds out of hanging priests and other grandees. “I have already saved the lives of six people about to be hanged in different sections of the city,” he wrote in July of 1789. “The people are insane, drunk with power; they will not listen to me forever . . . The minute I am gone, they lose their minds.”
Because Lafayette’s American Revolution bona fides gave him credibility with the people, he was named commander of the National Guard, the de facto top cop of France. After the storming of the Bastille, he ordered the symbol of the old regime to be torn down. (He sent George Washington the big Bastille key that still hangs in Mount Vernon’s hall.)
That October, when mothers fed up with bread shortages led thousands of Parisians on a thirteen-mile hike to Versailles to confront King Louis XVI, Lafayette escorted them, hoping to keep tempers in check. He couldn’t stop them from breaking into the palace and murdering a couple of guards whose heads they jabbed onto pikes, but he did save the lives of the king and queen, for the moment, by trotting Marie Antoinette out onto a balcony and kissing her hand, thereby pacifying the mob into letting the royal family come back to Paris with them in a carriage instead of in a hearse. Eventually the revolution’s radicals turned on Lafayette, who had to flee France to avoid the king and queen’s fate on the “National Razor,” the guillotine.
When Count Rochambeau, the general who had commanded the French forces backing up Washington’s Continental Army at Yorktown, was locked up by the radicals for “treason” in the Conciergerie, the same prison that housed Marie Antoinette, he lectured his jailors, “I cannot believe in this era of equality a former aristocrat has no rights except to march to the scaffold before anybody else, and to be the last man to prove his innocence. Those are not the principles I learned from Washington, my colleague and my friend, when we were fighting side by side for American independence.”
Researching Lafayette’s role in the Women’s March of 1789 required me to revisit my least favorite building on earth, the morally and architecturally bankrupt compendium of gilded nonsense and silken flimflam known as the Château de Versailles. So afterward I rewarded myself with a stop at the nearby Villa Savoye, a modernist country house of the early 1930s designed by architect cousins Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. The stark concrete edifice plopped into a field surrounded by woods is much more in keeping with my uptight Protestant aesthetic. Then it hit me how the streamlined architectural ideas that made that house a blank, low-key bunker from which to look outside and succumb to the trees’ embrace would be dumbed down through the decades into the national retail chains’ crass, cheapo big-box stores now besmirching the Montana valley I grew up in.
In other words, ideas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences. As the British historian and politician Lord Acton described the effect that our Revolutionary War had on our French allies, “What the French took from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of government—their cutting, not their sewing.”
A couple of days after Yorktown Day, the subject of the decades of instability unleashed by the French Revolution, as opposed to the governmental continuity spawned by the American Revolution, came up when I was visiting Monticello. I was talking to the British-born historian Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, in his office down the hill from Jefferson’s house. O’Shaughnessy is the author of The Men Who Lost America, a graceful, perceptive portrait of Great Britain’s politicians and commanders of the Revolutionary War. He told me, “It was Hannah Arendt who really made that point well. What she wanted to do was understand revolutions—why so many fail. And why the American Revolution seems almost a model for a successful one because they already had experience in self-government.”
He was referring to the German-born theorist’s 1963 book, On Revolution. In it, Arendt asserts that the French revolutionaries, as the subjects of an absolute monarch (not a constitutional monarch, as in Great Britain), “had no experiences to fall back upon, only ideas and principles untested by reality.” Thus the French Revolution, she alleges, turned into “an intoxication whose chief element was the crowd.” Which was a fine legacy for igniting later flare-ups, like the one that made good fodder for the Victor Hugo novel tarted up into a musical. But for anchoring a reasonably just government capable of handling the peaceful transfer of power for decades to come? Not so much.
Arendt suggests that the American colonists revolted “not because of any specifically revolutionary or rebellious spirit but because the inhabitants of the colonies” benefited from—and here she cites John Adams—“‘the right to assemble . . . in their town halls, there to deliberate upon the public affairs.’” The colonists, Arendt continues, “went to the town assemblies, as their representatives later were to go to the famous Conventions, neither exclusively because of duty nor, and even less, to serve their own interests but most of all because they enjoyed the discussions, the deliberations, and the making of decisions.”
The context of Patrick Henry’s explosive slogan “Give me liberty or give me death!” backs up Arendt’s assertion. Henry was speaking in 1775 at a meeting organized by thwarted members of Virginia’s House of Burgesses after the colony’s royal governor dissolved the House for the first time since it had convened at Jamestown way back in 1619. And why did the crown’s man in Virginia pull the plug on the oldest legislative assembly of elected representatives in British America? Because the burgesses had organized a day of “fasting, Humiliation and prayer” to show Bostonians moral support in light of the so-called Intolerable Acts that Parliament had passed as punishment for what was then referred to as the Destruction of the Tea, including closing the city’s port.
According to a version of Henry’s speech cobbled together later by his biographer William Wirt, Henry declared, “The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country.” His rhetoric heats up from there, culminating in the sizzling slogan we all know. But he wasn’t some crank on a street corner. He was addressing his fellow representatives just as Virginia subjects of the crown had been doing for a century and a half.
Moreover, if Arendt is right, Henry enjoyed it. How else to explain showbiz wordplay like “Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston!”
To Arendt’s point about post-revolution stability deriving from pre-revolutionary experience in self government, it’s worth remembering that two of Henry’s less chatty fellow burgesses became the first and third presidents of the United States.
Andrew O’Shaughnessy, referring to the masterminds of the 2013 government shutdown and no doubt alluding to the freshman senator who was its ringleader, told me, “Experience is terribly important. You’ll notice that the congressmen who want to hold up the government are all junior people and new to the game. And of course they will say, ‘Oh, it’s Washington cynicism, where they all compromise and work out backroom deals.’ But that’s actually how democracy works.”
Which is exactly how government operations resumed on October 17, 2013: a bipartisan group of old-school senators with the combined age of Stonehenge started hashing out a bargain drafted by third-term moderate Republican Susan Collins of Maine, who, prior to her election sixteen years earlier, had spent twelve years working behind the scenes as a legislative aide to her predecessor.
During the shutdown hubbub, I happened to read the message Franklin Roosevelt delivered to Congress in 1934 on the one hundredth anniversary of Lafayette’s death. “A centu
ry ago,” he said, “President Andrew Jackson, in communicating the melancholy news of the death of Lafayette to the Congress of the United States, called it ‘afflicting intelligence.’” Mentioning Jackson’s orders to the army and navy to pay tribute to Lafayette as “‘the distinguished friend of the United States,’” Roosevelt noted, “Congress, with rare felicity, added to this phrase, ‘the friend of Washington, and the friend of liberty.’”
I cannot think of a more euphemistic, upper-crust, dry martini of a zinger than “rare felicity,” FDR’s wry acknowledgment that every now and then, even a bunch of backbiting blowhards like the United States Congress can temporarily come together with their president to mourn the death of one of the few people, places, or things they and their fidgety constituents have ever agreed on. As a Frenchman who represented neither North nor South, East nor West, left nor right, Yankees nor Red Sox, Lafayette has always belonged to all of us.
In 1777, after young Lafayette had been in the Continental Army for about five months, he wrote to George Washington from across the camp at Valley Forge: “When I was in Europe I thought that here almost every man was a lover of liberty . . . You can conceive my astonishment when I saw that toryism”—loyalty to the British crown—“was as openly professed as whiggism,” the republican creed of the patriots. Back in France, he recalled, “I believed that all good Americans were united together.” But that was before he got here. In his reply, Washington acknowledged his fellow Americans’ “fatal tendency of disunion.”
