Washington’s Disappointment
In the midst of a pandemic that has already taken more
American lives than the Vietnam War, we are witnessing organized protests
calling for businesses to reopen and preventive actions to be lifted in direct
contradiction to medical and scientific expertise. Mobs, including demonstrator
brandishing firearms and confederate battle flags, are demanding that states
ignore the best advice from the most qualified experts because their freedom is
evidently more precious than the health and safety of the general populous.
Serendipitously, I recently received an anthology of Richard
Hofstadter’s writings as the newest installment in my subscription from
Library of America. This collection begins with his book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, for which he won his second
Pulitzer Prize in history.
It is fascinating examination of how the “red scare” of in the middle of the 20th century had deep roots in American history. Anti-intellectualism was the common
thread over time. Hofstadter posits that knowledge and intellectual capacity
became “unpopular” because they represented power.
“The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad
cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide
reading in history, politics, and law to solve the exigent problems of their
time.”[1] He notes
that soon after the United States was formed, political challengers
orchestrated campaigns that drew an imaginary divide between the intellectual
and the practical.
Hofstadter cites a letter Charles Carroll wrote to Alexander
Hamilton, in which he says Jefferson was, “Too theoretical and fanciful a
statesman to direct with prudence the affairs of this extensive and growing
confederacy.” Hofstadter notes, “Even in its earliest days, the egalitarian
impulse in America was linked with a distrust for what in its germinal form may
be called political specialization and in its later forms expertise.”[2]
It is astonishing that a nation founded by intellectuals has
been so frequently shaped by widespread rejection of expertise. The Founding
Fathers of this nation were also the founders of the American Philosophical
Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We are all well aware of
the experiments and inventions of Jefferson and Franklin, but Adams, Rush,
Madison, and Washington were actively engaged in the scientific discourse and
discovery of the time.
Washington was one of the most scientifically advanced
farmers in the colonies. He designed a variety of agricultural devices and
systematically planted test beds for each crop, experimenting with different
mixtures of seeds, fertilizers, and planting techniques, using the most
successful models to increase the productivity of his plantations.[3]
As a young man, Washington had contracted small pox in
Barbados. He nearly died, but upon recovery, was immune. This protected him
from outbreaks during the Revolutionary War, but in 1777, that disease was as
much a threat to the Continental Army as the British.
Washington consulted the expertise of his Medical Director,
John Morgan, to determine if variolation, a then controversial process by which
individuals were inoculated by being scratched with thorns exposed to the
pustules of small pox suffers, could protect his troops from an outbreak. The application
produced significantly reduced sickness than the actual disease followed by
immunity. Washington ordered 40,000 troops to be variolated. In one year, the
infection rate among his army dropped from 17% to 1%. It may well have won the
war. [4]
Just as he recognized that engaging the best expertise was
critical to his success as a military leader, Washington believed that the development
of experts was paramount to the advancement of the new republic.
In his final “Annual Message to Congress,” Washington called for the
creation of a national military college, which came to fruition, and a national
university that did not. He was an important benefactor in the founding
of two liberal arts colleges that bear his name: Washington College in Maryland
and Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Our first president believed in
the importance of these “Seminaries of learning,” but he believed that the scale
of achievement he dreamt for our nation would require an investment that only
a nation could make.
The Assembly to which I
address myself, is too enlightened not to be fully sensible how much a
flourishing state of the Arts and Sciences, contributes to National prosperity
and reputation. True it is, that our Country, much to its honor, contains many
Seminaries of learning highly respectable and useful; but the funds upon which
they rest, are too narrow, to command the ablest Professors, in the different
departments of liberal knowledge, for the Institution contemplated, though they
would be excellent auxiliaries.
Amongst the motives to
such an Institution, the assimilation of the principles, opinions and manners
of our Country men, but the common education of a portion of our Youth from
every quarter, well deserves attention. … In a Republic, what species of
knowledge can be equally important? and what duty, more pressing on its
Legislature, than to patronize a plan for communicating it to those, who are to
be the future guardians of the liberties of the Country? [5]
The
Founding Fathers were as flawed as they were foresighted. They brought forth
the Bill of Rights, but they also implemented
the Alien and Sedition Acts. They
established a democratic republic in which only a minority held suffrage and in
which slavery was tolerated, but they had the foresight to create a government
that had the capacity to evolve toward a better ideal.
They
also recognized that the successful evolution of their political experiment
would require leaders well versed in the all the liberal arts: the sciences,
humanities, the fine arts, and social sciences. They sponsored the creation of
many of our leading colleges to foster the next generation of leaders; they
founded leading intellectual societies to review and disseminate the best
scientific knowledge of the day; and they dreamed that the United States would
develop the intellectual expertise necessary for their young republic to flourish.
Were he to witness these recent demonstrations refuting the collective
guidance of our best experts, imagine Washington’s disappointment.
[1]
Hofstadter, Richard: Anti-Intellectualism
in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays
1956-1965, edited by Sean Wilentz, 163. New York: Library of America, 2020.
[2]
Ibid., 168-169.
[3]
Tom Shachtman: Gentlemen Scientist and Revolutionaries: The
Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment, 8. New York: St. Martin’s,
2014.
[4]
Ibid., 101-112.