The book, "Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different" of 2006, is an essay collection, authored by the award-winning Gordon Wood from Brown University. He gives thoughtful discussions about the Founders and talks about their backgrounds, achievements, and even thoughts. Wood succeeds in supporting his argument that the Founders used their good characters in leadership and tells us why it has been hard for subsequent leaders to imitate which is “the growth of egalitarian democracy” (Wood, 29). “Why don’t we have such leaders today?” he asks (Wood, 4). Wood is bewildered by the fact that an equal society such as America lacks leaders with similar qualities as those of Founding Fathers.
This book shows how each founder succeeded at their time, and how and why it has become hard for their characters and achievements to imitate. Wood argues, “ideas and power, intellectualism and politics never again duplicated in American history” (Wood, 5). Overtime it has been difficult to find leaders with similar intellect, love for country and diligence as those of our Founding Fathers. Eight Founders are discussed separately in the book and their contributions to the American Revolution. These top historians are George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Paine, and Aaron Burr in that order. Wood uses Aaron Burr as a counter example. Wood argues that, what made the Founders different from leaders who came later, was the way they were able to bring together the achievement of high intellect in their political lives and lives of affairs and their leadership. Wood calls them “the leading intellectuals of their day” (Wood, 10). Today, thinkers and intellectuals are not in any way connected with politics in the United States.
The Founders were not interested in public service but were more concerned with the voluntary sacrifice for the whole public. They valued being gentlemen more and urged other gentlemen to have united affairs and beliefs. Wood says, “Unlike the French or Germans, the American sense of identity – the United States – was founded on a set of beliefs, not a common ethnicity, language or religion.” (Wood, 5)They believed unlike what the European assumed in the 18th-century, that a person becomes a gentleman, not by birth, but how they behaved, and their actions.
The book, "Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different" has achieved its goal of teaching about the value of character in leadership. The author achieved this by making the Founders seem less mythical and more relatable in the context of both their time and ours too. Few authors have been able to achieve this to make them less “myths and legends” (Wood, 7). He reveals all the characters one by one and compares them and their relationships to each other.
He makes them so relatable and real such that the reader feels like he is in the setting, as if he can see and understand the intensity available. Wood achieves this by describing that times background and the intensity such that it seems like it is the present. The reader is able to feel their greatness, their losses, downfall, weaknesses, humanness and reality.It is an accomplishment for Wood to bring the Founders and their era to a place where modern readers and historians can access them. For him to teach us that even much has happened and changed in the past two hundred years, the virtues that we aim to have are those that these men defined.
Wood used high intellectual arrangement of the essays in the book. He uses all of them to show how the founding fathers used their thoughts, principles and conduct throughout their lengthy careers to guide the nation. The book is well organized. The introduction and conclusion of the book show that he book is coherent. They all talk about the gentlemanly characters of the Founders and their effects and their “values and duties”.
The style of writing used in the book is that of an elegant writer, which Wood is. He has been writing about these men in decades before and has now brought them together adding perspective along the way. His style is captivating, enjoyable, and easy to read. He gives a good presentation of the biographies of the founding fathers making it easy for readers to appreciate their comprehensive workings.
The book however does not give deep detailed information about the history of the founding fathers, or what they were able to achieve. I feel like this is a major omission that Wood did and that this topic and more information about it would have strengthened the book and its overall goal. I do not fully appreciate this unusual approach to the story of the Founders. For example, the reader would like to find out Alexander Hamilton’s struggles but is left without the full story.
The essay on George Washington is more convincing. Wood’s views that Washington was the best president America has ever had, is common knowledge and past historical event and evidence has proved this to be true. However, Wood shows undue biases and unfairness to Alexander Hamilton, and yet favors Thomas Jefferson in a way that is not fully merit. His bias does not have support from the text. Wood’s conclusion is also flawed because even though the Founders put up a perfect systemsuch that it did not need philanthropic disinterested elite to operate it, history has proved that there is need for people of their character to run it. He says that “Public leaders had to become actors or characters, masters of masquerade,” to show that he does not completely trust in them (Wood, 25).
The fact that the book concentrates on the characters of the Founders especially their negative ones and not their achievements or positive personalities and qualities is a little bit frustrating. He talks about how they were not “immune to the allures of interest that attracted most ordinary human beings” (Wood, 12) .Wood presumes to know the Founders’ true feelings, motives and thoughts even if he did not know any personally. There is also a questionable negativity when author insinuates that he is talking about something that he does not like when he writes about the leaders’ disinterest in leadership even if it is a positive thing.
"Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different" is one of the best books that I have come across that is about both America's Founders and the Revolutionary War. It offers a comprehensive subject to these topics and would be a good tool for researching the discussed people, for this reason I would highly recommend it. I would especially recommend it to people who are interested in the American history like high school students, even if they are not highly educated scholars, because it offers a clever, basic coverage on the challenges like political and social upheavals and personalities of both the times of revolutionand post-revolution. It makes this history more interesting and understandable. Although some chapters are more complex and more understandable by historians such as the one on James Madison that shows that his thinking proved that he had consistency contrary to what many belief, a lay reader should not have a problem in understanding the book (Wood, 145). When readers of this both get to understand and appreciated the discussed men anew, they might get moved to read the broad biographies that Wood recommends.
Work cited
Gordon S. Wood. Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different.Penguin Press. 2006. Print.
