This is chapter two of Jeff Riggenbach’s new book, Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism. The preface, table of contents, etc. are here.
I: Burr and Lincoln
Washington, D.C. (1967) was followed six years later by Burr (1973), which covers the period 1775 to 1840 as it was lived and understood by the notorious Aaron Burr. Another three years went by, and Vidal published 1876 (1976), portraying the events leading up to and immediately following the hotly contested presidential election campaign of the U.S. Centennial year, which pitted Democrat Samuel Tilden of New York against Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio.
It was nearly a decade before Vidal would add another volume to the American Chronicle series. That next volume was the celebrated Lincoln (1984), which follows events in Washington from Abraham Lincoln's surreptitious arrival in the city to be inaugurated for his first term in the White House to his assassination scarcely four years later. Lincoln was followed, in quick succession, by Empire (1987), which focuses on the years 1898 to 1906, and Hollywood (1990), which focuses on U.S. involvement in World War I and its immediate aftermath – the years 1917 to 1923. Then, after a decade of work unrelated to the American Chronicle, Vidal published the final volume of the series, The Golden Age (2000). Oddly, this volume does not depict a previously undramatized period of years. As Harry Kloman puts it, u201CRather than simply taking place after Washington, D.C. – which covers the years 1937 to 1952 – The Golden Age loops back to re-cover the same years, 1939 to 1954.u201D It also features almost all of the same characters. And, of course, the major historical events in the two novels are the same. As Kloman writes, The Golden Age u201Cis the narrative Washington D.C. might have been had Vidal written the books chronologically.u201D Thus u201CYou might think of the new book as an alternative version of the older one.u201D Kloman points out that u201C[w]hen Vidal published Washington, D.C. in 1967, he had no plan to tell America's story from the Revolutionary War through the present.u201D Accordingly, he counsels, u201Cnow that Vidal has completed the series, one might just consider it to be six books in length, with Washington, D.C. standing off to the side, in part an accidental beginning to a Chronicle that it no longer fits, and in part an alternative conclusion that's more literary and introspective than historical.u201D [91]
In the following pages, I take Kloman's advice: I use the term u201CAmerican Chronicleu201D to refer to the following set of six novels, arranged and discussed in correct historical sequence: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and The Golden Age.
Burr is narrated by a fictional character, Charles Schermerhorn (u201CCharlieu201D) Schuyler, a young clerk employed in the New York law office of Aaron Burr. Charlie moonlights as a journalist, writing fairly regularly for the poet William Cullen Bryant, in the latter's capacity as editor and publisher of the New York Evening Post. It is 1833, Andrew Jackson has just begun his second term in the White House, and the political cognoscenti are already debating who should be his successor. Jackson himself favors his vice president, Martin Van Buren, as does Bryant. But Bryant's assistant on the Post, William Leggett, is not convinced of Van Buren's suitability. He has heard rumors that Van Buren is one of Burr's many illegitimate children, and he believes that a book or pamphlet proving the truth of that rumor to the public's satisfaction would have the estimable effect of ruining Van Buren's chances for the presidency. He hires Charlie to research and write such a book or pamphlet.
In the course of his research, Charlie will discover that he himself is one of Colonel Burr's illegitimate offspring. But in the beginning he thinks of the Colonel as merely his elderly boss (Burr is seventy-seven when the novel begins), who turns out to be more than willing to have his brain picked. He gives Charlie his journal of the Revolutionary War period to read. He dictates his further memoirs to Charlie in a series of meetings, some of them at the law offices where both of them work, some of them in Burr's home. Burr's narrative is alternated with Charlie's own so that the reader is gradually filled in on the history of the United States from the beginning of the Revolution to the last days of the second Jackson administration. This history is not, however, the conventional one which most of Vidal's readers have presumably had presented to them in school. As Donald E. Pease puts it, what Burr presents in these pages is u201Can alternate American narrativeu201D in which the founding fathers look somewhat different from the way most readers are accustomed to seeing them. u201CInstead of finding them to be representative of American civic virtue and American democracy, for example, Burr explains Washington's belief in a strong central government as an effort to protect his vast landholdings in Mount Vernon, and Thomas Jefferson's espousal of states' rights simply as a political strategy to win votes.u201D [92]
Burr is appalled at what he considers to be Washington's u201Cincompetenceu201D as a military leader. [93] He notes that Washington u201Cdid not read booksu201D and that though he u201Cwas always short of money, he lived grandly.u201D He looks back on Washington as having been u201Cdefective in grammar and spelling, owing to a poor educationu201D and as having been u201Cmost puritanical.u201D He speaks derisively of our first President as having been u201Cunable […] to organize a sentence that contained a new thought.u201D [94] He tells Charlie that when u201Cin September 1777 the British out-manoeuvred Washington once again and occupied Philadelphia,u201D
the Philadelphians did not at all mind the presence of the British army in their city; in fact, many of them hoped that Washington would soon be caught and hanged, putting an end to those disruptions and discomforts which had been set in motion by the ambitions of a number of greedy and vain lawyers shrewdly able to use as cover for their private designs Jefferson's high-minded platitudes and cloudy political theorizings. [95]
Jefferson makes out no better than Washington in Burr's eye view. u201CHe was the most charming man I have ever known,u201D Burr tells Charlie, u201Cas well as the most deceitful.u201D All in all, in Burr's view (as imagined by Vidal), Jefferson was a prize hypocrite. u201CProclaiming the unalienable rights of man for everyone (excepting slaves, Indians, women, and those entirely without property),u201D Burr sneers, u201CJefferson tried to seize the Floridas by force, dreamed of a conquest of Cuba, and after his illegal purchase of Louisiana sent a military governor to rule New Orleans against the will of its inhabitants.u201D [96]
Not only did Jefferson betray his supposed individualist ideals, he refused to fight for them when the time came – at least, as Aaron Burr sees it. u201CI do remember hearing someone comment,u201D he tells Charlie, u201Cthat since Mr. Jefferson had seen fit to pledge so eloquently our lives to the cause of independence, he might at least join us in the army.u201D But did he? No. Instead, while Washington's army suffered at Valley Forge, Jefferson u201Cspent a comfortable winter […] at Monticello where, in perfect comfort and serenity, he was able amongst his books to gather his ever-so-fine wool.u201D [97] Later, when the British army closed in on Richmond,
Governor Jefferson fled to Monticello, leaving the state without an administration. At Monticello he dawdled, thought only of how to transport his books to safety. Not until the first British troops had started up the hill did he and his family again take to their heels. Later Patrick Henry's faction in the Virginia Assembly demanded an investigation, but fortunately for Jefferson the proud Virginia burgesses did not want to be reminded of the general collapse of their state and so their hapless governor was able to avoid impeachment and censure. He did not, however, avoid ridicule; and that is worse than any formal censure. [98]
Not only was Jefferson a coward and a fraud, according to Burr, he was also u201Ca ruthless manu201D who u201Csimply wanted to rise to the top. Odd how Jefferson is now thought of as a sort of genius, a Virginia Leonardo. It is true he did a great number of things, from playing the fiddle to building houses to inventing dumb-waiters, but the truth is that he never did any one thing particularly well – except of course the pursuit of power.u201D [99]
The pursuit of personal power is, however, difficult to reconcile with the ideal of individual liberty proclaimed in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, according to Burr, Jefferson never really believed very fervently in such individual liberty. Consider freedom of speech and of the press, for example. Burr quotes Jefferson as having told him in late 1803 or early 1804, that
u201C[i]n 1789, Madison sent me a copy of the proposed amendments to the Constitution, and I wrote him that I thought he should make it clear that although our citizens are allowed to speak or publish whatever they choose, they ought not to be permitted to present false facts which might affect injuriously the life, liberty, property or reputation of others or affect the national peace with regard to foreign nations. Just the other day I reminded Madison of that sad omission in our Constitution, and he agreed that today's monstrous press is a direct result of the careless way the First Amendment was written.u201D
Still, as Burr relates it, Jefferson did not advocate federal action against members of the press who published u201Cfalse facts.u201D On the contrary. u201CAs usual, Jefferson had a way around the difficulty […]. u2018Since the federal government has no constitutional power over the press, the states can then devise their own laws.'u201D [100]
Perhaps worst of all (at least in the eyes of some), there was the matter of Jefferson's slave, Sally Hemings – or, as Burr refers to her, u201CJefferson's concubine Sally, by whom he had at least five children.u201D Sally was an illegitimate daughter of John Wayles, Jefferson's father-in-law, Burr tells Charlie, u201Cwhich made her the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife. […] Amusing to contemplate that in bedding his fine-looking slave, Jefferson was also sleeping with his sister-in-law! One would have enjoyed hearing him moralize on that subject.u201D [101]
Nor are Washington and Jefferson the only Founding Fathers to rank low in Aaron Burr's estimate. There is also Alexander Hamilton, whom Burr had met and befriended during the Revolution – or so, at any rate, he tells Charlie. As the years passed, however, the two men not only grew apart but also came more and more regularly into conflict. In the end, Burr killed Hamilton in a duel. Burr does not explain to Charlie why he called Hamilton out, but an old friend of Burr's, Sam Swartwout, the customs collector of the port of New York, does the job for him. Hamilton, Swartwout tells Charlie, had accused Burr, a widower, of living in incest with his lovely, intelligent, and accomplished daughter.
The 1804 duel with Hamilton is perhaps the most famous event in Burr's life. The second most famous is probably his arrest and trial, four years later, on charges of treason. As Burr tells Charlie the latter story, it reminds him (unsurprisingly) of Jefferson's hypocrisy and lust for power. According to Burr, Jefferson tried to suspend habeas corpus so he could continue to hold two of Burr's alleged associates in a military prison and u201Cbeyond the reach of the Constitution.u201D In his defense, Jefferson argued that u201C[o]n great occasions, every good officer must be ready to risk himself in going beyond the strict line of law, when the public preservation requires it.u201D His political opponents, Jefferson acknowledged, u201Cwill try to make something of the infringement of liberty by the military arrest and deportation of citizens, but if it does not go beyond such offenders as Swartwout, Bollman, Burr, Blennerhassett, etc., they will be supported by the public approbation.u201D Burr's summary of Jefferson's view is succinct and unsparing. u201CIn other words,u201D he tells Charlie, u201Cif public opinion is not unduly aroused one may safely set aside the Constitution and illegally arrest one's enemies.u201D [102]
In the next novel in Vidal's series, Lincoln, another president employs the same tactics, and justifies his actions in a very similar way. It is now more than fifty years after Jefferson's abortive attempt to suspend habeas corpus. Abraham Lincoln is making war against the Southern states that seceded from the Union at the beginning of his first term in the White House. In his attempt to ensure that Maryland does not join those seceded states, he imposes martial law, orders the arrest of u201Canyone who takes up arms – or incites others to take up arms, against the Federal government,u201D and orders further that those arrested be held u201Cindefinitely without ever charging them with any offense.u201D His justification is reminiscent of the one Burr attributes to Jefferson, who spoke of u201Cthe public preservation.u201D u201C[T]he most ancient of all our human characteristics is survival,u201D Lincoln tells his Secretary of State, William H. Seward. u201CIn order that this Union survive, I have found it necessary to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, but only in the military zone.u201D As Lincoln sees it, he is merely exercising what he calls the u201Cinherent powersu201D of the presidency when he takes actions of this kind. And, as he tells Seward, u201CAn inherent power […] is just as much a power as one that has been spelled out.u201D [103]
Lincoln is not narrated in the first person as Burr is. Rather it is narrated in the third person – not an u201Comniscientu201D third person, but one whose point of view hops around among a short list of important characters: Lincoln's secretary, John Hay; Secretary of State Seward; Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase; First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln; and David Herold, the pharmacist's clerk and Southern sympathizer who was later convicted of conspiring successfully with John Wilkes Booth and others to assassinate Lincoln early in his second term in office.
The Lincoln thus presented might well be expected to resemble the proverbial elephant as observed by several different blind men. But in fact Vidal's Lincoln is much more coherent than that, for his observers are not blind. They differ widely in their opinions and interpretations of what they see, but what they see is identifiably the same man. Harold Bloom looks at Vidal's Lincoln and sees u201C[a] minority President, elected with less than 40 percent of the total vote.u201D
Though his election committed him only to barring the extension of slavery to the new states, and though he was a moderate Republican and not an Abolitionist, Lincoln was violently feared by most of the South. Vidal's opening irony, never stated but effectively implied, is that the South beheld the true Lincoln long before Lincoln's own cabinet […] The South feared an American Cromwell, and in Vidal's vision, the South actually helped produce an American Bismarck. [104]
Vidal's Lincoln, says Donald E. Pease, is u201Cinterested mostly in self-aggrandizement,u201D though his interest in sex was sufficient in his younger years that he u201Ccontracted syphilis from a prostitute and communicated this disease to his wife and children.u201D [105] To Fred Kaplan, Vidal's Lincoln is u201Ca pragmatic and manipulative politician with one overriding vision: to save the Union and by saving it to transform it into a modern, industrialized, national state so powerfully and tightly coherent that nothing can tear it apart again.u201D [106]
This mania for u201Csaving the Unionu201D cannot be overestimated as a central factor in the motivations and behavior of Vidal's Lincoln. As Bloom notes, Vidal's Lincoln is u201Ca respecter of neither the states, nor the Congress, nor the Court, nor the parties, nor even the Constitution itself.u201D [107] Pease makes the same point when he writes that u201CVidal's Lincoln is a political heretic who believes in none of the political instruments supportive of union (the Congress, the Courts, the Constitution) except insofar as they can supplement his will to absolute executive power.u201D [108]
Vidal's Lincoln is also no Great Emancipator. Vidal's Lincoln, as Pease points out, u201Cbelieves the emancipation of slaves entails their exportation to the West Indies or Liberia.u201D [109] For, as Kaplan notes, though he is u201C[o]pposed to slavery, Lincoln does not believe slavery an issue worth fighting about.u201D [110] Vidal's Lincoln tells the assembled delegates of the Southern Peace Conference that met with him shortly after his election that u201CI will do what I can to give assurance and reassurance to the Southern states that we mean them no harm. It is true that I was elected to prevent the extension of slavery to the new territories of the Union. But what is now the status quo in the Southern states is beyond my power – or desire – ever to alter.u201D u201CI have never been an abolitionist,u201D he tells his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton.To a delegation of black freemen that comes to meet him at the White House, Vidal's Lincoln declares that u201Cyour race is suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves you are still a long way from being placed on an equality with the white race.u201D His secretary, John Hay, sitting in on the meeting, reflects that the president u201Cwas unshaken in his belief that the colored race was inferior to the white.u201D
The fact that Lincoln had always found it difficult to accept any sort of natural equality between the races stemmed, Hay thought, from his own experience as a man born with no advantage of any kind, who had then gone to the top of the world. Lincoln had no great sympathy for those who felt that external circumstances had held them back.
Early in his second term, Vidal's Lincoln informs Congressman Elihu Washburne (R-Illinois) of his intention to u201Creimburse the slave-ownersu201D for their freed slaves. This, he tells Washburne, u201Cwill […] be a quick way of getting money into the South for reconstruction.u201D In addition to the money he'll need for that plan, he adds, u201Cwe'll need money to colonize as many Negroes as we can in Central America.u201D Washburne is somewhat astonished that the president still favors such a plan. u201CWhen you get hold of an idea,u201D he says to Lincoln, u201Cyou don't ever let it go, do you?u201D Lincoln replies: u201CNot until I find a better one. Can you imagine what life in the South will be like if the Negroes stay?u201D [111]
Vidal's Lincoln is firm in his belief that slave-owners should be compensated for their loss and that the freed slaves should be deported. He is also firm in his belief that both these issues are merely tangential to the war raging between the United States and the Confederate States. Late in 1861, when the rogue Union general John C. Frmont declares martial law in Missouri (a border state) and announces that he will u201Cconfiscate the property of all secessionists, including their slaves, who were to be freed,u201D Vidal's Lincoln declares u201Cwith anguish, to Seward, u2018This is a war for a great national idea, the Union, and now Frmont has tried to drag the Negro into it!'u201D As Vidal sees it, this understanding of the war was not only Lincoln's, but also that of other prominent Americans of the time. Early in 1863, for example, not long after the president has delivered his annual message to Congress, Vidal's John Hay finds himself in conversation with the lawyer, diplomat, and newspaperman Charles Eames (1812-1867), who assures him that u201Cwhat the war is aboutu201D is u201Cthe principle that the Union cannot be dissolved, ever.u201D Later that year, when Union forces under General George G. Meade finally won a decisive victory over Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Meade telegraphed the White House, according to Vidal's account, that he now looked u201Cto the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.u201D Vidal's Lincoln does not like Meade's choice of words. u201COf course, Pennsylvania is our soil,u201D he tells Hay. u201CBut so is Virginia. So are the Carolinas. So is Texas. They are forever our soil. That is what the war is about and these damned fools cannot grasp it; or will not grasp it. The whole country is our soil. I cannot fathom such men.u201D [112]
Fully in keeping with this understanding of what the war is all about is Lincoln's view of how reconstruction should be handled once the war is won. The Radical Republicans take the formation of the Confederate States of America at face value: u201Cthe states in rebellion were out of the Union and should be treated as an enemy nation's conquered provinces.u201D
But Lincoln's line was unwavering. The Union was absolutely indivisible. No state could ever leave it; therefore no state had ever left it. Certain rebellious elements had seen fit to make war against the central government, but when those elements were put down all would be as it was and the Southern states would send representatives to Congress, exactly as they had done in the past. [113]
But, of course, after the war, nothing was as it was before the war. Not only had 600,000 Americans lost their lives in the conflict, but another 400,000 were wounded, many of whom were crippled for life. Altogether, nearly 1,000,000 Americans were casualties of the war, out of a total population of a little more than 31,000,000. If three percent of the current U.S. population were to be killed or wounded in a war, we would be looking at nearly 9,000,000 casualties. There was also extensive property damage, particularly in the South – damage so extensive it would be many decades before anything resembling a full economic recovery could be said to have taken place there. Perhaps most important of all, in Vidal's version of the years 1861-1865, a series of precedents was laid down by the Lincoln administration which, in the years ahead, would justify the steady erosion of individual liberty in the United States.
For Vidal's Lincoln does not limit his assault on the Constitution to the suspension of habeas corpus. He tells Seward not long after his first inauguration, u201CYesterday, at three in the afternoon, I ordered every U.S. marshal in the country to seize the original of every telegram that has been sent and a copy of every telegram that has been received in the last twelve months.u201D Seward wonders aloud about u201C[t]he legal basis for this seizure,u201D and Lincoln answers, u201CThe broader powers inherent in the Constitution.u201D Vidal's Lincoln censors the press, locking up editors who oppose his policies. Vidal's Baron Gerolt, the Prussian minister to Washington, tells Seward that his own boss, Otto von Bismarck, u201Cvery much admires the way that you arrest editors but he dares not do the same in Prussia because he says that, unlike you, he is devoted to freedom of speech.u201D That Vidal's Lincoln is not in fact devoted to freedom of speech is made evident by his action against the former Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham, who u201Cheld that Lincoln's war measures were illegal and unConstitutional [sic] and so far worse than the defection of the Southern States.u201D Vidal's Lincoln has Vallandigham arrested and forcibly exiled to the Confederacy. Vidal's Lincoln threatens to place New York City under martial law to suppress opposition to the nation's first military conscription law. Vidal's Seward reflects in 1864 that there is now u201Ca single-minded dictator in the White House, a Lord Protector of the Union by whose will alone the war had been prosecutedu201D and that u201CLincoln had been able to make himself absolute dictator without ever letting anyone suspect that he was anything more than a joking, timid backwoods lawyer.u201D Charlie Schuyler, the narrator of Burr, reappears briefly in a couple of scenes in Lincoln, and, in the novel's closing pages, observes to John Hay that Bismarck u201Chas now done the same thing to Germany that you tell us Mr. Lincoln did to our country.u201D [114]
II: 1876, Empire, and Hollywood
1876, the third novel in Vidal's American Chronicle series, is once again narrated in the first person by Charlie Schuyler (now in his early sixties), who has returned to the United States after spending thirty years in Europe, first as a member of the diplomatic corps, then as the husband of an independently wealthy member of a noble family. His wife is now long dead, Charlie's money has run out, and his wealthy son-in-law's recent, unexpected departure from this world (followed by the discovery of his carefully concealed penury), has left him responsible once more for his accomplished daughter, Emma, whom he had thought well married and safely provided for. Charlie has continued to dabble in journalism over the years, has even published a book or two. So he and Emma come back to the United States in 1875 on a triple errand: Charlie will attempt to earn a sufficient amount from freelance writing for newspapers and magazines to support the two of them in decent style; Charlie will meanwhile do what he can to help New York Governor Samuel Tilden get himself elected president in the upcoming 1876 election (and to persuade Tilden to send Charlie right back to Paris as U.S. Ambassador to France); and Charlie will also see if he can find another, comparably well fixed husband for his daughter. In the course of covering both the presidential campaign and the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and in the course of marketing his daughter to financially qualified suitors, Charlie meets and profiles numerous luminaries of the period – Tilden, Republican Congressman and presidential aspirant James G. Blaine, Republican Senator and presidential aspirant Roscoe Conkling, Chester Alan Arthur (the customs collector of the port of New York), President U. S. Grant, journalist Charles Nordhoff, and Mark Twain among them – but the emphasis here is not, as it was in Burr and Lincoln, on the sayings and doings of these actual historical figures. Nor does Vidal's vision of these famous people conflict with the conventional understanding of them in the way that his vision of Lincoln and the Founding Fathers does. He presents the Grant administration as riddled with corruption, but this is a commonplace. He portrays Tilden as the legitimate winner of the 1876 election, who was defrauded of his rightful presidency by the Republican Party and the U.S. Supreme Court – but this is another commonplace. The emphasis in 1876 is on the imaginary characters, on Charlie and Emma and on the rich new husband they find for her, William Sanford.
In terms of historical chronology, Sanford made his first appearance in the American Chronicle in the pages of Lincoln, where he was seen as a wealthy young Union captain, an aide to General Irvin McDowell, who devoted his spare time to romancing Kate Chase, daughter of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. u201CI plan to leave the army the first of the year,u201D Sanford tells Kate late in 1862. u201CWe could go to France. There is a house there I've had my eye on since before the war. At St. Cloud, near Paris. We could have a wonderful life. I'd study music. You could be at court, if you wanted that.u201D [115]
Kate doesn't take Sanford up on his offer. Instead she marries the equally wealthy, if somewhat drunken, senator from (formerly governor of) Rhode Island, William Sprague. Sanford moves on, then meets and marries another woman, who turns up in 1876 as the delightful Denise Sanford, another of the imaginary characters whose sayings and doings dominate the pages of this third novel in Vidal's series. Denise becomes pregnant, then dies in childbirth; the Sanfords' infant son Blaise is spared. Within weeks, Sanford has wooed and wed Emma. Within a year, she herself is dead in childbirth, leaving behind a daughter, Caroline de Traxler Sanford, the illegitimate great-granddaughter of Aaron Burr.
As the fourth novel in Vidal's series, Empire, opens, the year is 1898 and Caroline is twenty. She attends a luncheon party which also includes John Hay, Henry James, and Henry Adams. Hay and Adams are familiar to us from Lincoln, in which Hay functioned as one of Lincoln's two secretaries, and as an important point-of-view character, and in which Adams functioned as Hay's young friend, scion of the famous Adams family but determined to make it on his own as a journalist. Hay is about to be appointed Secretary of State by Republican President William McKinley, who has just led the nation to victory against Spain in the Spanish-American War. We learn that Caroline's father has just died and that she and her half-brother Blaise are quarrelling over the estate. In an effort to gain leverage over her brother, Caroline appropriates some valuable paintings from their family home, sells them, and uses the proceeds to buy a dying daily, the Washington Tribune, which she proceeds to transform into a journalistic success story. She does so, in no small part, by carefully following the lessons never spelled out but always implied by the successive triumphs of Blaise's employer, William Randolph Hearst. Thus, though Blaise works as Hearst's personal assistant, and though he lusts to own a paper in his own right, it is his half-sister who proves to be Hearst's more talented student.
Caroline runs the Tribune alone for seven years, during which time she becomes pregnant by a young, married Congressman, James Burden Day, and quickly marries an impecunious cousin to provide her daughter Emma with an official father and herself with an official mate, sparing Day a scandal that might ruin his career, settling her husband's many troublesome debts, and never revealing, either to her husband or to her daughter, the identity of Emma's actual father. After she finally collects her inheritance, Caroline brings Blaise into her newspaper operation as co-publisher. She decides to invest in real estate in Georgetown, despite the fact that it is u201Cstill mostly Negro,u201D because u201Chere and there, eighteenth-century townhouses were being restored by the canny white rich. Caroline had taken two row houses and knocked them into one.u201D [116]
It is not long, however, before Caroline is living only part time in Georgetown. By 1917, as Hollywood, the fifth novel in Vidal's series, opens, she is adopting a new identity, as silent film actress Emma Traxler, and a second part-time home, this one in Los Angeles. Blaise, meanwhile, has also married and produced children, the younger of whom, Peter Sanford, will follow his father into journalism, except that he will eschew the world of newspapers for the world of magazines, devoting his career to a journal of analysis and opinion called The American Idea. In the epilogue of The Golden Age, the sixth and final volume of Vidal's American Chronicle, it is the turn of the 21st Century and the now elderly Peter Sanford is being interviewed, along with his friend Gore Vidal, at Vidal's home in Italy for a TV documentary. The producer-interviewer who is putting the documentary together is Aaron Burr (u201CA. B.u201D) Decker, grandson of Caroline's daughter Emma and thus great-great-great-great-grandson of the original Aaron Burr, with whose story the series began.
The last three novels of the series focus more attention on the sayings and doings of the Sanford family, James Burden Day, and other imaginary figures, and comparatively less on the historical events and personages of the times in which they take place. The three are, in fact, all of a piece with respect to this issue. Fred Kaplan tells us that Vidal had originally planned for the first two of these three novels to be a single book:
[T]hrough much of 1985-86 he had worked on Manifest Destiny, the tentative title of the next novel in his American history series. When the manuscript became too long, he used much of it under the title Empire […], published in June 1987 […]. The remainder became the core of Empire's successor, Hollywood, which was published in February 1990. [117]
Harry Kloman suggests that Empire is overly u201Cconcerned with frivolities, name-dropping, and gossipy historical deconstruction,u201D [118] and Andrew Sullivan faults The Golden Age in very similar terms:
The characters in the novel – writers, senators, proprietors of political magazines and their countless relatives – are all so well-heeled that their conversation […] amounts to little more than chatter. […] At times the book reads like one of those interminable Vanity Fair pieces about cocktail parties in the 1950s given by society hostesses no one but a complete snob would give a hoot about. [119]
On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that all this frivolous chatter and gossipy name dropping is not entirely irrelevant to Vidal's purpose in the American Chronicle series. For a large part of that purpose is to make certain points about journalism – as a shaper of the historical record, as an influence on public opinion, and as a center of social power. Journalism is a prominent presence throughout the American Chronicle, as are individual journalists, both real ones like William Cullen Bryant, Henry Adams, and William Randolph Hearst and invented ones like Caroline, Blaise, and Peter Sanford. The sayings and doings of these journalists do have thematic significance, however frivolous they may seem at certain times and to certain readers. Indeed, it might be argued that their very frivolity and superficiality are meant to tell us something about journalists and journalism in the abstract.
Also, though the last three novels in the series do focus to a greater extent than the first three on the sayings and doings of imaginary journalists, they are by no means limited entirely to depictions of these journalists. The politicians who figured large between 1898 and 1954 are depicted also, and in ways that differ markedly from more conventional accounts of the period. Secretary of State John Hay, for example, minces no words in describing the frank racism and imperialism behind the foreign policy he recommends to President McKinley, when the latter seeks his guidance on the matter of the Philippines, newly u201Cliberatedu201D from Spain. u201CI have always thought,u201D Vidal's Hay says,
u201Cthat it was the task of the Anglo-Saxon races, specifically England, now shrinking, and ourselves expanding, to civilize and to,u201D Hay took a deep breath and played his best if most specious card, u201CChristianize the less developed races of the world. I know that England is counting on us to continue their historic role, and they believe, as I believe, that the two of us together can manage the world until Asia wakes up, long after we're gone, I pray, but with our help now, a different sort of Asia, a Christian Asia, civilized by us, and so a reflection of what was best in our race once history has seen fit to replace us.u201D [120]
Lest there be any misunderstanding, Vidal's Hay also assures the president that he has mercantilist as well as racist and imperialist reasons for believing the United States should hold onto the Philippines. u201CThe European powers are getting ready to divide up China,u201D he tells McKinley. u201CWe'll lose valuable markets if they do, but if we are entrenched nearby, in the Philippines, we could keep the sea lanes open to China, keep the Germans and the Russians and the Japanese from upsetting the world's balance of power.u201D [121]
Hay's views are shared fully by the bellicose governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt, who is destined to become McKinley's second vice president a scant two years later, and, after McKinley's assassination only a few months into his second term, the youngest man ever to have assumed the American presidency up to that time. u201CHave you read Admiral Mahan on sea-power?u201D Vidal's Roosevelt demands of Blaise Sanford during an interview. u201CPublished nine years ago. An eye-opener. I reviewed it in the Atlantic Monthly. We are fast friends. Without sea-power, no British empire. Without sea-power, no American empire, though we don't use the word u2018empire' because the tender-minded can't bear it.u201D [122] Then the governor really gets going.
Roosevelt was now marching rapidly in a circle at the center of the room. He had been seized by a speech. As he spoke, he used all the tricks that he would have used and [sic] had Blaise been ten thousand people at Madison Square Garden. Arms rose and fell; the head was thrown back as if it were an exclamation mark; right fist struck left hand to mark the end of one perfected argument, and the beginning of the next. u201CThe degeneracy of the Malay race is a fact. We start with that. We can do them only good. They can do themselves only harm. When the likes of Carnegie tells us that they are fighting for independence, I say any argument you make for the Filipino you could make for the Apache. Every word that could be said for Aguinaldo could be said for Sitting Bull. The Indians could not be civilized any more than the Filipinos can. They stand in the path of civilization.u201D [123]
I speak now only of savages,u201D Vidal's Roosevelt insists.
u201CWhen Mr. Seward acquired Alaska, did we ask for the consent of the Eskimos? We did not. When the Indian tribes went into rebellion in Florida, did Andrew Johnson offer them a citizenship for which they were not prepared? No, he offered them simple justice. Which is what we shall mete out to our little brown brothers in the Philippines. Justice and civilization will be theirs if they but seize the opportunity. We shall keep the islands!u201D [124]
Later, after he has become president and asked Hay to stay on as Secretary of State, Vidal's Roosevelt defends the diplomatic and military chicanery by means of which he obtained the right of way through Panama to build a canal in that Central American country. u201CThe point, John, is that we have done something useful for our country. Our fleets can go back and forth, quickly, between Atlantic and Pacific.u201D Hay is perplexed. u201CYou see a future so filled with war?u201D he asks the president. And Vidal's Roosevelt replies, u201CYes, I do. […] I also see our own mission, which is to lead where once England led, but on a world scale…u201D [125]
Still later, when President Woodrow Wilson has led the United States into involvement in World War I, Vidal's Roosevelt shows up at the White House to offer to lead a volunteer division in France. While there, he takes the opportunity to offer the president some advice on his conduct of the war. He points out to the president that u201Cthe German-language press […] has been, from the beginning, disloyal to this country. I would, as a military necessity, shut all those papers down.u201D Wilson is taken somewhat aback. u201CIsn't this – arbitrary?u201D he asks Roosevelt. u201CSurely, they are guaranteed the same freedoms –u201D But Roosevelt cuts him off. u201CThis is war, Mr. President. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, shut down newspapers, and we'll have to do the same….u201D Nor is this all he recommends to the startled president. u201CMany would-be traitors – German sympathizers – pretend to be peace-lovers, to be – what's their phrase? – u2018conscientious objectors.' Well, I would treat them conscientiously! I would deny them the vote. If they are of military age and refuse to fight for their country, then they must forgo their citizenship.u201D [126]
Vidal's Wilson, for his part, a u201Cprofessional historian, who preferred the British parliamentary system to the American executive system,u201D is not at all averse to the idea of helping the British with just about anything they might want to undertake. Once he decides to intervene in World War I to aid the British, he follows Roosevelt's advice and harshly censors the press. But he finds to his sorrow that, even with his critics silenced, there is insufficient public support for his war. As a result, there are u201Ctoo few volunteers.u201D He has a solution, though: u201CWe must conscript the young men. Draft them. Find a new word for draft, if necessary, but no matter what the word, there is so little time to do so much in.u201D Accordingly, Vidal's Wilson wastes no time in making sure that u201C[c]onscription was […] swift and absolute and under another name. On June 5, ten million men between twenty-one and thirty had been registered under the National Defense Act for u2018selective service' in the armed services, which sounded rather better than, say, cannon fodder in France.u201D [127]
III: Hollywood and The Golden Age
Wilson's successors in the White House, Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover, are both much more wary of foreign entanglements. (Vidal pays short shrift to Calvin Coolidge, who served between Harding and Hoover, perhaps because Coolidge merely carried out Harding's foreign policies.) Blaise Sanford looks at Harding and muses that
[t]he fact that Harding's career had been one of astonishing success could not be ascribed solely to brute luck or animal charm. Without luck and charm, Harding would probably not have had a political career. But he had had the luck and the charm and something else as well, hard to define because he was so insistently modest. [128]
So modest is Vidal's Harding that he publicly gives all credit for his administration's triumph at the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference in 1921 to his Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes. In fact, as Vidal tells it, all Hughes had done was u201Cread off the particulars of Harding's secret plan,u201D under which u201Cthe United States was willing to scrap thirty capital shipsu201D and u201CGreat Britain, Japan, France and Italy were invited to rid themselves of close to two million tons of war-ships.u201D [129]
Harding had figured that if any word of his plan were to leak to the press, military expansionists everywhere would have time to rally public opinion against disarmament. Hence the thunderbolt, hurled by Hughes in the presence of the benign presidential author. It was Harding's theory that once world opinion was appealed to, there would be no way for the various governments to back down.
Harding's theory proved correct. His u201Cgamble paid off. The world was enthralled, and in the course of a single morning Harding became the central figure on the world's stage, and the most beloved.u201D [130]
Herbert Hoover, who entered the White House as president six years after Harding's sudden death, attempted to continue his predecessor's peace-loving foreign policy, only to be brought up short by the machinations of his own Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson. Stimson, according to Vidal's Hoover,
u201Cwanted to make all Asia our responsibility. That means if the Japanese would not let go of Manchuria, we would go to war with them. When I realized what he was up to, I called a Cabinet meeting and read Henry the riot act. I agreed that although Japanese behavior on the mainland of Asia was deplorable, we were in no way threatened, economically or morally.u201D [131]
Making war under such circumstances is repugnant to Vidal's Hoover. u201CI would never sacrifice any American life anywhere,u201D he states forthrightly, u201Cunless we ourselves were directly threatened.u201D u201CPeople forget,u201D Vidal's Hoover complains, u201Cthat when I was elected president we were occupying most of Central America and the Caribbean. I pulled the Marines out of Haiti, out of Nicaragua, and then when our war lovers insisted that we invade Cuba and Panama and Honduras, I said no.u201D [132]
After 1932, Hoover is helpless to prevent war so easily, for he has been voted out of office and replaced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a distant cousin of the earlier, Republican Roosevelt, who had been so bellicose and eager for hostilities. The new, Democratic Roosevelt u201Cgoes on and on about how he hates war because he has seen war,u201D Vidal's Hoover declares with evident contempt. u201CAs usual, he lies. He toured a battlefield or two after Germany had surrendered. And that was that. He saw no war. Does he hate what he has never experienced? Who knows? But I had to feed the victims of that war and I don't want anything like that to happen ever again. But Stimson does. Roosevelt does. I find them unfathomable.u201D [133]
By the time Vidal's Hoover utters these remarks the two unfathomable creatures at whose motives he so marvels are busily working together, for Roosevelt names Stimson his Secretary of War just after winning an unprecedented third term in the White House in November 1940. And thereafter, Vidal's Stimson and Vidal's FDR conspire to turn American public opinion around 180 degrees so that it will favor the course they themselves fervently advocate: U.S. intervention in the European war that began in 1939. Another of their co-conspirators is Harry Hopkins, the former social worker turned presidential confidante and adviser. u201CA principal architect of the New Deal, as the President's largely unsuccessful plan to end the Depression was called, Hopkins was the man in the shadows, forever whispering into the President's ear, as they experimented with programs and secretly manipulated friends and enemies.u201D [134] And, as luck would have it, Hopkins also becomes a close friend of Caroline Sanford, who returns to Washington in 1939, at the beginning of The Golden Age. She is sixty and has spent the last decade in Europe, but is now bent on playing an active part once again in the daily publication of the Washington Tribune. Her friendship with Hopkins makes her privy to much interesting information.
There is no way,u201D Hopkins tells Caroline,
u201Cthat we – this administration anyway – will let England go down. We can always handle the isolationists here at home […] [w]ith some protective camouflage for Churchill, for England. The fact is they haven't been a great power since 1914. But we all kept pretending they were until Hitler came along. Up till then the whole thing has been a sort of bluff. That's why we keep going on about a special relationship between the English-speaking nations, […] [d]isguising the fact that we are the world empire now and they are simply a client state. A bunch of offshore islands. Certainly they are close to us in many ways, but they aren't necessary to us. To be blunt, we can survive – even thrive – without them, which is the wicked wisdom of the intelligent isolationists who are not just for America First, as they like to say in their speeches, but for Amerika ber Alles.u201D [135]
The question is how the president is going to involve the United States in the European war, coming to the aid of the British, when most Americans clearly oppose such an intervention. Former U.S. Senator Thomas Pryor Gore of Oklahoma, the blind politician turned out of office in 1936 by his constituents (perhaps for his outspoken criticism of the popular, if u201Clargely unsuccessful,u201D New Deal), remains in Washington, where he has spent so much of his career, practicing law, talking politics with his numerous friends in and around the District, and relying on his grandson, Eugene Luther Vidal, Jr. (who will later become famous as the novelist, playwright, and essayist Gore Vidal), as an assistant and guide around the Capitol. In a conversation with the fictitious Senator James Burden Day, Vidal's Gore declares unequivocally that u201Cthe President has a plan, even some sort of timetable,u201D and that he is u201Cprovoking Japan into attacking us so he can live up to his campaign promise that, if elected, no sons of yours will ever fight in a foreign war – unless, of course, we are attacked.u201D In that event, if the attacker were Japan, not only would u201Cthe nation […] be willing to enter the war,u201D but the United States would also be involved in the European conflict, u201Cbecause Germany and Italy would have to honor their military treaty with Japan.u201D [136]
u201CIt's a very clever game.u201D Gore's one glass eye had strayed northward, while the blind eye was half shut. u201CEighty percent of our people don't want us to go back to Europe for a second world war and nothing will ever persuade them, no matter how many of our ships the Germans sink. So we at least learned that lesson from last time. But to get the Japanese to strike first is true genius – wicked genius.u201D [137]
Hopkins instructs Caroline on the wisdom of this plan. u201C[I]t is wisest for the President to let them make the first move. We think they'll attack Manila, and if by some miracle they should manage to blow up that horse's ass MacArthur, our cup will truly runneth over.u201D Even if they don't blow up MacArthur, however, u201Cthere's no going to war unless all your people are united behind you. Well, they are nowhere near united even though we keep losing ship after ship to the Nazis and no one blinks an eye. So we must take one great blow and then…u201D
Hopkins pauses and Caroline prompts him by asking, u201CThen what?u201D
u201CThen we go for it,u201D Hopkins replies. u201CAll of it. And get it.u201D
u201CWhat is it?u201D Caroline demands, frustrated.
u201CThe world,u201D Hopkins tells her. u201CWhat else is there for us to have?u201D [138]
Vidal's Roosevelt succeeds in provoking the Japanese into an attack on Pearl Harbor. He succeeds too in concealing his foreknowledge of this event from the naval command in Hawaii, thereby insuring that the u201Cone great blowu201D his nation must take is a great one indeed – great enough, devastating enough, to bring about the complete turnaround in public opinion that is necessary for the president to take the nation into a foreign war without committing political suicide in the process. However, FDR does not live to see the end of the war he leads his nation into. That pleasure falls to his successor, the unassuming Missouri haberdasher Harry S. Truman. And Truman minces no words in making it clear that he favors precisely the sort of U.S.-dominated world envisioned by Roosevelt and Hopkins. When Blaise Sanford's son Peter covers one of Truman's early speeches on foreign policy for his magazine The American Idea, he finds that
[t]he President not only briskly assumed for the United States global primacy but made it clear that from this moment forward the United States could and would interfere in the political arrangements of any nation on earth because u201CI believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by outside pressure.u201D [139]
On the other hand, this is not to say that everything in President Truman's foreign policy would have met with the approval of either Roosevelt or Hopkins. On the contrary. As Hopkins puts it to Caroline,
u201CHenry Wallace says Harry will agree with you before you've actually said what you mean. Then he'll go around telling everyone he gave you hell. Now it looks like he wants to give Stalin hell. That's bad news. The Boss was always willing to treat Stalin in a normal way. As the head of the other great world power. That's why Stalin trusted him, to the extent Russians ever trust anybody. Then Harry goes off to Potsdam and starts to renege on every agreement we made at Yalta. All because he's got the atomic bomb and they don't. So we're going to have a very expensive arms race and trouble everywhere.u201D [140]
In summary, then, Gore Vidal's American Chronicle novels tell a tale of American history that would seem passing strange to anyone whose understanding of the subject is confined to what has long been conventionally taught in American public schools and colleges. In Vidal's American history, the Founding Fathers are not graven saints, but fallible mortals driven as often by vanity, greed, and lust (whether for power or for the flesh of attractive slave girls) as by any belief in the nobility of their cause, and more often bent on benefiting themselves and the members of their social class than on benefiting Americans in general. In Vidal's American history, Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union at the cost of destroying everything about it that had made it worth preserving – the protections supposedly afforded by the Constitution to the inalienable individual rights of American citizens. In Vidal's American history, a cabal of racist imperialists had seized control of the federal government within scarcely more than a hundred years of the Constitution's ratification, and sent its young men on a rampage of international meddling and mass murder that culminated in the total destruction of two Japanese cities. In Vidal's American history, it was the United States, not the Soviet Union, which launched and then prolonged the Cold War.
NOTES
[91] Harry Kloman, u201CGore Vidal's American Chronicles: 1967-2000.u201D Online at http://www.pitt.edu/~kloman/vidalframe.html
[92] Donald E. Pease, u201CAmerica and the Vidal Chroniclesu201D in Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 269.
[93] Gore Vidal, Burr (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 14.
[94] Ibid., pp. 55, 56, 58.
[95] Ibid., p. 83.
[96] Ibid., pp. 154, 160.
[97] Ibid., pp. 58, 87.
[98] Ibid., p. 177.
[99] Ibid., p. 219.
[100] Ibid., p. 257.
[101] Ibid., p. 196.
[102] Ibid., p. 351.
[103] Gore Vidal, Lincoln (New York: Random House, 1984), pp. 153, 152.
[104] Harold Bloom, u201CThe Central Man: On Gore Vidal's Lincolnu201D in Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 223-224.
[105] Pease, op.cit., pp. 272-273.
[106] Kaplan, op.cit., p. 740.
[107] Bloom, op.cit., p. 224.
[108] Pease, op.cit., p. 272.
[109] Ibid., p. 272.
[110] Kaplan, op.cit., p. 740.
[111] Vidal, Lincoln, op.cit., pp. 38, 556, 356, 635.
[112] Ibid., pp. 240, 391-392, 447, 448.
[113] Ibid., pp. 430-431.
[114] Ibid., pp. 126, 273, 389, 421, 437-438, 457-458, 459, 656.
[115] Ibid., p. 347.
[116] Gore Vidal, Hollywood: A Novel of America in the 1920s (New York: Random House, 1990), p. 18.
[117] Kaplan, op.cit., p. 766.
[118] Kloman, op.cit.
[119] Andrew Sullivan, u201CThe Greatest Generation (Revised).u201D New York Times 1 October 2000. Online at http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/01/reviews/001001.01sullivt.html
[120] Gore Vidal, Empire (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 73.
[121] Ibid., p. 72.
[122] Ibid., p. 127.
[123] Ibid., p. 129.
[124] Ibid., p. 130.
[125] Ibid., pp. 373-374.
[126] Vidal, Hollywood, op.cit., p. 70-71.
[127] Ibid., pp. 33, 69, 82.
[128] Ibid., p. 376.
[129] Ibid., p. 366.
[130] Ibid., p. 367.
[131] Gore Vidal, The Golden Age (New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 166.
[132] Ibid., pp.166-167.
[133] Ibid., p. 167.
[134] Ibid., p. 56.
[135] Ibid., pp. 58-59.
[136] Ibid., p. 172.
[137] Ibid., p. 173.
[138] Ibid., p. 195.
[139] Ibid., p. 307.
[140] Ibid., p. 262.
