Inventing a Nation Quotes

“Much of the significance of December 2000 was that the Electoral College, created to ensure that majority rule be thwarted if unacceptable to what Hamilton thought of as the proper governing elite, threw a bright spotlight on just how undemocratic our republic has become, causing one of the Supreme Court Justices (by many thought to be a visiting alien) to respond to the Gore lawyers who maintained that Florida’s skewed voting machines and confused rulings by various interested courts had deprived thousands of Floridians of their vote for president. The American Constitution, said the Justice, mandibles clattering joyously, does not provide any American citizen the right to vote for president. This is absolutely true. One votes for a near-anonymous member of the Electoral College, which explains why so few Americans now bother to “vote” for president. But then a majority don’t know what the Electoral College is.”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well-administred; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administred for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“Talleyrand was notorious for taking bribes. But then he was endlessly practical. He liked to lecture the young foreign office clerks on the necessity of masturbating before coming to work, thus ensuring unclouded minds at least throughout the morning.”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“[Tu quoque is the best defense.]”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“In all of this, Adams and Hamilton are not in the forefront. Adams would need Republican votes if he was to be reelected, while Hamilton’s brilliant lawyerly mind had, in two Federalist papers, anticipated the Jefferson-Madison dilemma. From Federalist No. 26: “The State legislatures who will always be not only vigilant but suspicious and jealous guardians of the rights of the citizens against encroachments from the federal government, will constantly have their attention awake to the conduct of the national government, and will be ready enough, if anything improper appears, to sound the alarm to the people, and not only to be the voice, but if necessary the ARM of discontent.” It is possible that Jefferson had not read this, but Madison, coauthor of The Federalist, would have known it well and could easily have deeply embarrassed the aborning Bonaparte. But Hamilton was not brought into the matter.”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“Although the founders were often good classicists, they took as a model for the American republic the pre-Julius Caesar Roman Republic. For the record, our word democracy comes from the Greek demokratia, which means, literally, “people-power.” History’s only democracy was instituted at Athens in 508 B.C. by Cleisthenes. Every male citizen over eighteen years of age was a citizen, able to gather with his fellows on a hillside, where, after listening to various demagogues, he could vote with the other citizens on matters of war and peace and anything else that happened to be introduced that day. In 322 B.C. Alexander of Macedon conquered Athens and eliminated their democracy, which was never again to be tried by a proper state (as opposed to an occasional New England town meeting). Current publicists for the American Empire have convinced themselves that if other nations, living as they do in utter darkness, would only hold numerous elections at enormous cost to their polity’s plutocracy (or to the benign empire back of these exercises), perfect government would henceforward obtain as The People had Been Heard: one million votes for Saddam Hussein, let us say, to five against. Although the Athenian system might now be revived through technology, voting through some sort of “safe” cybersystem, no one would wish an uneducated, misinformed majority to launch a war, much less do something meaningful like balance the budget of Orange County, California. One interesting aspect of the Athenian system was the rotation of offices. When Pericles told Sophocles, the poet-dramatist, that it was his turn to be postmaster general or some such dull office, Sophocles said he was busy with a play and that, besides, politics was not his business. To which the great Pericles responded, the man who says politics is no business of his has no business.”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“Washington’s anger was a slow but certain force once ignited. He rebuked both men: for allowing “internal dissensions” that harrow and tear our vitals. Privately, he told Jefferson that he must show “more charity for the opinions and acts of another.” He warned Hamilton about his volatile temper as well as his penchant for rushing into print with “irritating charges.” He urged each to make “allowances, mutual forbearances and temporizing, yielding on all sides.” Plainly, the father of his country knew best, but his intransigent sons ignored him.”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“Meanwhile, British Agent Number Seven was fulfilling more than his job as Great Britain’s man on the spot. He warned Beck-with that the pro-French Jefferson could make trouble “from some opinions he has given respecting your government,” but, luckily, “Washington was perfectly dispassionate.” Then Hamilton appears to divide his loyalties: “I shall certainly know the progress of negotiations from day to day. . . . In case any such difficulties should occur, I should wish to know them in order that I may be sure they are clearly understood and candidly examined.” A double agent appears to have been born. By December 1791 Jefferson realized that Hamilton was leaking the content of cabinet meetings to the British. By 1792 the rivals were so at odds that Washington came down from his Olympus and asked each what this great division in his cabinet—now being reflected in the nation—was all about.”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“and the people. Hamilton was indeed a singular character. Of acute understanding, disinterested, honest and honorable in all private transactions, amiable in society, and honorable in all and duly valuing virtue in private life, yet so bewitched & perverted by the British example, as to be under thoro’ conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation.”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“On February 14 Jefferson accepted the post. On February 23, 1790, Jefferson’s daughter Martha was married at Monticello to a third cousin, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. Presumably, on the scene was her youthful aunt the slave Sally Hemings, daughter of Martha’s grandfather, John Wayles. The fact that Jefferson would have six children by Sally (half-sister to his beloved wife, another Martha) has been a source of despair to many old-guard historians, but, unhappily for them, recent DNA testings establish consanguinity between the Hemingses and their master, whose ambivalences about slavery (not venery) are still of central concern to us. If all men are created equal, then, if you are serious, free your slaves, Mr. Jefferson. But they were his capital. He could not and survive, and so he did not. He even transferred six families of slaves to daughter Martha and her husband. It might be useful for some of his overly correct critics to try to put themselves in his place. But neither empathy nor compassion is an American trait. Witness, the centuries of black slavery taken for granted by much of the country.”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“When it came to the mechanics of presidential elections, the Constitution had rather light-heartedly ruled that the candidate who got the most votes in the Electoral College would become president, while the runner-up would become the vice president. This deliberately ignored the matter of faction or party, which came to a head in 1796, when the Proto-Federalist Adams was elected president while the Proto-Republican Jefferson became vice president. In 1804 the Twelfth Amendment allowed for party interest by requiring separate balloting for president and vice president. The Electoral College, however, remains to this day solidly in place to ensure that majoritarian governance can never interfere with those rights of property that the founders believed not only inalienable but possibly divine.”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“Finally, the ambassadors concluded their task of keeping Europe not only out of American affairs but, indeed, out of the entire Western Hemisphere. In 1846 President Polk observed: “We must have California.” Since that Pacific littoral was part of Mexico, Polk provoked Mexico into a war with the United States. California, Arizona, and Utah were ceded two years later. More peacefully, the tidy-minded Polk acquired the Pacific Northwest by treaties with England. With the acquisition of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, the Union now filled the continent from sea to shining sea. In 1867 the Russians sold us their icebox, Alaska, while Hawaii was annexed in 1898, along with Puerto Rico and the reluctant Philippines. While this filling in of vast spaces with neatly ruled new states, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams produced for President James Monroe a doctrine declaring that the two American continents were off limits to Europe, as Europe would be to us. In 1917, by entering World War I, we in effect voided the Monroe Doctrine. But that was to gain yet another world, one that is currently—optimistically—called “global.” Benjamin”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“Power,” writes Adams, “always follows property. Men in general, in every society, who are wholly destitute of property, are also too little acquainted with public affairs for a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own. They talk and they vote as they are directed by some man of property, who has attached their minds to his interest.” With this acknowledgment, Adams becomes Jeffersonian or Jefferson Adamsian: “A balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society, to make a division of land into small quantities. . . . If the multitude is possessed of landed estates, the multitude will have the balance of power, and in that case the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue and interest of the multitude in all acts of government.”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“King George III, who had made the monumental mistake of learning English, was very much the head of the war party, and so, more in anger than in sorrow, he dropped the mask of Mr. Nice Guy. He would now use his Indians, some thirty thousand German soldiers, mostly from Hesse, a Rhineland province bordering his family’s Hanoverian place of origin. The Hessians turned out to be more generally effective than the American or, indeed, the British troops. They were also considered uncommonly attractive by American girls, who found the homegrown lads a bit on the scrawny, sallow side, later to be caricatured as “Uncle Sam.” By the end of the Revolution, a great many Hessians had married American girls and settled down as contented farmers in the German sections of Pennsylvania and Delaware, their lubricious descendants to this day magically peopling the novels of Mr. John Updike.”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

“In the end, only Washington’s majestic presence kept the army together. He was also lucky in his British counterparts: mediocrities to a man. (One British observer noted, “Any general in the world other than General Howe would have beaten General Washington; and any general in the world other than General Washington would have beaten General Howe.”)”
― Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

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