“played off in the funerals of Washington, Hamilton, and Ames,” which are “all calculated like drums and trumpets and fifes in an army to drown the unpopularity of speculations, banks, paper money, and mushroom fortunes” (July 25, 1808, 123–24). Washington’s acting abilities deserved mention too, for “we may say of him, if he was not the greatest President, he was the best actor of presidency we have ever had,” even achieving “a strain of Shakespearean and Garrickal excellence in dramatical exhibitions” (June 21, 1811, 197). So too the clever financial maneuverings beneath Washington’s alleged “sacrifices,” such that “he raised the value of his property and that of his family a thousand per cent, at an expense to the public of more than his whole fortune” (August 14, 1811, 201). As late as 1812, Adams was stressing Washington’s special status as a “great character,” “a Character of Convention,” explaining, “There was a time when northern, middle, and southern statesmen and northern, middle, and southern officers of the army expressly agreed to blow the trumpet of panegyric in concert, to cover and dissemble all faults and errors, to represent every defeat as a victory and every retreat as an advancement, to make that Character popular and fashionable with all parties in all places and with all persons, as a center of union, as the central stone in the geometrical arch” (March 19, 1812, 230, emphasis in original). A similar process was under way in France with Napoleon, and “something hereafter may produce similar conventions to cry up a Burr, a Hamilton, an Arnold, or a Caesar, Julius or Borgia. And on such foundations have been erected Mahomet, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Kublai Khan, Alexander, and all the other great conquerors this world has produced” (ibid.).
This range of observations should illustrate the uncertainty and inconsistency of Adams’s speculations, which were by no means confined to Washington. Indeed, the topic of reputation and mystique seems to have been prompted by comments exchanged in 1805, about the Spanish American adventurer Francisco de Miranda. Adams had written Rush of “a concurrence, if not a combination, of events” that struck him (December 4, 1805, 47). “Col. Burr at Washington, General Dayton at Washington, General Miranda at Washington, General Hull returning from his government, General Wilkinson commanding in Louisiana, &c., &c.” (ibid.). Rush answered that Miranda had in fact recently paid a visit and had reminded him, “in his anecdotes of the great characters that have moved the European world for the last twenty or thirty years, of The Adventures of a Guinea, but with this difference—he has passed through not the purses but the heads and hearts of all the persons whom he described” (January 6, 1806, 48). “I never had the good fortune to meet General Miranda nor the pleasure to see him,” answered Adams:
I have heard much of his abilities and the politeness of his manners. But who is he? What is he? Whence does he come? And whither does he go? What are his motives, views, and objects? Secrecy, mystery, and intrigue have a mighty effect on the world. You and I have seen it in Franklin, Washington, Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson, and many others. The judgment of mankind in general is like that of Father Bouhours, who says, “For myself, I regard secret persons, like the great rivers, whose bottoms we cannot see, and which make no noise; or like those vast forests, whose silence fills the soul, with I know not what religious horror. I have for them the same admiration as men had for the oracles, which never suffered themselves to be understood, till after the event of things; or for the providence of God, whose conduct is impenetrable to the human mind” (January 25, 1806, 49).
A few months later, Adams returned to these observations with this outburst: “Secrecy! Cunning! Silence! voila les grands sciences de temps modernes. Washington! Franklin! Jefferson! Eternal silence! impenetrable secrecy! deep cunning! These are the talents and virtues which are triumphant in these days,” he concluded, quickly adding, “When I group Washington with Franklin and Jefferson, I mean only in the article of silence” (July 23, 1806, 64).
How are we to read these exchanges? Let us start by considering two likely responses of contemporary readers. On the one hand, we might enjoy a certain gratifying titillation at hearing perhaps unknown, gossipy details about the Founding Fathers. This pleasure results not only from a familiarity with the Founders but also from a certain defamiliarization, as these mythical figures are made somewhat new. At the same time, however, many readers—above all, scholars—may feel a certain distaste at the continued fetishization of the elites of the past. After all, hasn’t much scholarship of the past century tried to move us away from such historiography, toward social or structural histories? Isn’t the history of the early republic to be found in histories from below, in the lives of women, workers, farmers, slaves, and Native Americans, rather than in the same old arcana of a few white, male elites? Isn’t a return to Adams’s musings about Washington and others somehow reactionary, a sign of that irritating phenomenon known as “Founders Chic”? Shouldn’t this Founders Chic be resisted?3
We would note, first, that this combination of responses—of guilty pleasure and critical disgust, of fascination and of knowing better—perfectly characterizes the musings of Adams himself. In the letters with Rush, he simultaneously indulges in and resists the aura of the Founders. His persistent enumeration of humanizing details and secret histories, shared with Rush in order to puncture the mystique of the already mythically enhanced elites, simultaneously exposes and perpetuates their perplexing prominence. Indeed, we would argue that this particular affective combination is exactly what defines Founders Chic. Like Adams, those who succumb to Founders Chic imagine that others naively, blindly, uncritically admire and worship the Founders—whether they are the fools voting for Jefferson or the modern purchasers of a best-selling biography. But it is this complex of fascination, this desire to decipher and interpret an inexplicably compelling cultural formation, that defines the phenomenon, and to cure ourselves we must begin by acknowledging that the logic of debunking will not get us very far. As Roland Barthes realized upon completion of Mythologies, myth debunking had become a myth in itself, a classroom exercise that any student could execute with facility, but without any ultimate threat to myth itself.4 In short, the critique of myth is often essential to its enjoyment. Nor can we say that debunking is a later phenomenon. In the case of Founders Chic, the seemingly contrary tendency toward humanizing details, context, and “secret” histories was present from the start, an integral part of the formation of the Founders Fantasy. Thus, when contemporary hagiographies startle their readers by telling them, first, the shocking details of a Jefferson or a Franklin and, second, that lo and behold these details actually appeared in the newspapers of the time!!, they fundamentally obscure the problem. This favorite rhetorical move makes one marvel at the Founders all the more, for they seem to have become larger than life despite knowledge of their sexual histories, their racial politics, or their political maneuvers. Actually the reverse is the case: the Founders emerged as significant symbolic figures because of these biographical, semic details.5 We see precisely this relationship in the Adams-Rush correspondence, in which the secret histories and private details of the Founders, dished to deflate their mystique, rather amplify it instead. This phenomenon is more pertinent than ever today, when ostensibly humanizing and demythologizing biographical details preserve and renew the Founders’ mythological status.6
If we want to cure ourselves of Founders Chic, then, we cannot have recourse to the details that fill the letters of Adams and Rush: they are part of the problem we need to address. Instead, we must focus on the formal insights indirectly articulated in these letters. Two related observations seem particularly important. The first is that the Founders are constituted by a carefully structured emptiness. Adams and Rush touch on this point again and again when they speak of the secrecy, silence, mystery, and intrigue that characterize such figures, when the Founders are compared to deep rivers and silent forests, or when Washington is described as a stone that fills a gap in a geometrical arch.7 These gaps are then restlessly filled by semic details. Adams’s list of Washington’s ten talents is exemplary of this manic overlay. And the observation that those who lauded Washington “in the highest strains” also held him in the “strongest terms of contempt” confirms that this content need not be consistent in fact or affect. Thus, vitriol, scandal, and rumor may as easily fill that empty space as heroic feats, gestures, and words. The point is that biographical details are subordinate
