Adam Gopnik's Great-Man Theory

[UNLOCKED]

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik discussed the historian Danielle Allen’s new book Radical Duke, under the headline “Did a Rowdy English Nobleman Mastermind the American Revolution?” The answer to that question is a firm “No.” And yet, while I find it hard to believe that Danielle Allen’s thesis is “Yes,” Gopnik’s certainly seems to be.

So I’m going to have to read the book. I have a longstanding interest in the radical Whigs of Britain, less because they influenced the American revolutionaries, though of course they did, than because I find the fantasies they engendered about the supposedly ancient and exceptional rights of Englishmen at once kind of admirable and kind of crazy, and I think those fantasies have had a major impact on modern ideas about rights.

I also have a longstanding interest in the thinking of Thomas Paine—for me, he’s the missing link among radical Philadelphia, radical London, and radical Paris (“missing” in that the great E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class, left out Philadelphia). Paine is a major factor in both Allen’s book and Gopnik’s article.

According to Gopnik, Allen frames Paine’s thinking as entirely derivative of the thinking of one Charles Lennox, the Third Duke of Richmond (1735-1806). Which a Paine fan can only call huge if true.

I’ll do more with Allen’s book another time, when I’ve found out if Gopnik’s description of it is correct, but what I’m interested in now are Gopnik’s views of the American Revolution, the U.S. founding period, and Thomas Paine. A veteran New Yorker staff writer, and maybe the most adept, engaging, and intellectually fluid among them, Gopnik has attitudes that inform and are informed by a particular liberal political sensibility, which is reflected in his essays at what has to be the highest level. For many years I’ve admired those essays, especially on literature. Whenever I finish a famous 19th or 20th Century novel for the first time, or for the first time in a long while, I hope to find that Gopnik has written about it.

When he applies his engaged, gently sardonic, judiciously passionate riffing imagination and his mastery of prose to the national founding, usually by reviewing a new book, he can seem to be confronting, at least to a degree, certain gritty, not always edifying historical realities. And yet he persistently manages to avoid acknowledging—or manages to remain unaware of—any notion of an inherent conflict between the famous founders, who were members of the traditional American governing elite of the day; and the social and economic working-class American radicalism of the day, a kind of populism, at odds with the traditional American governing elite. I see that conflict as decisive to the founding of the country and the politics of the Federalist period.

So, OK—Gopnik and I disagree. Big deal. But he doesn’t argue that the founding class conflict didn’t exist, or wasn’t historically decisive. Instead, everywhere the conflict seems to me to pop undeniably up, he blanks it out, and into that blank disappear a lot of objective facts.

Gopnik does the blank-out thing in his essay on Allen's book, and there he’s even talking about radicalism. And the radicalism of the Third Duke of Richmond is indeed very interesting. So is the Duke’s relationship with Thomas Paine, if you’re interested in things like that, and I am. Allen has written on the subject before, in article form. She discovered, among other things, a pamphlet pre-dating “Common Sense,” published in Britain, dedicated to the Duke and written, she thinks, at least in large part by Paine, well before he came to North America. That’s cool.

Gopnik, however, tries to place the influence of the Duke, and British origins generally for American thinking about liberties and rights, in a context of correcting what he rightly calls Americans’ wanting to “Americanize the American Revolution”—the misguided desire to believe everything about our origins as a people occurred here for the first time. There can indeed be great benefit in placing the Revolution in larger geopolitical and intellectual contexts, but the story Allen’s telling doesn’t do what Gopnik wants it to. He says that Allen states, more aggressively than it’s ever been stated before, the “view that the American Revolution was forged by others and began elsewhere.”

It’s very old news—some of the oldest—that English thinking, emerging especially from the English Civil War, had a major impact on the English-speaking North Americans who began resisting what they cast as British violations of colonials’ rights. It’s also anything but a revelation that some of that thinking can be called radical, and that some of it was expressed by aristocrats. Ignoring those contexts, and yet excited by Allen’s exploration of the particular intellectual and political relationship of Richmond and Paine, Gopnik takes a deep breath and makes this long, strange leap:

Paine, then, was not the political innocent he claimed to be when he left for America, in 1774. He was what today might be called an “outside agitator,” sent specifically by Richmond to bring the new doctrines of democracy to the outer edge of empire—an Enlightenment Lenin sent to the Boston Harbor.

Just in itself, Gopnik’s implication that Paine is generally understood to have been disengaged from politics before his arrival in North America is strange. Everybody who reads about Paine knows that he’d been involved in political protest in Britain. What’s flat-out absurd, though, is characterizing Paine as a mere operative of Richmond, dispatched “to bring the new doctrines of democracy to the outer edge of empire.” If that statement truly reflects Allen’s argument, I’ll have more to say after I’ve read the book, but the interesting question, to me today, is why Gopnik wants to view Paine in a way that reframes the origins of American democracy by ascribing them to Richmond. What work, as the academics used to ask, does his almost unbelievably faulty description of Paine’s efforts in America do for the liberal New Yorker sensibility I mentioned above?

I find a hint in one of Gopnik’s trademarks: the truly clever flourish. He says Paine was sent to the Boston Harbor. Because, you know, Lenin was sent to the Finland Station (hello?! is this thing on?!). As a New Yorker reader presumed by a New Yorker writer to catch a ref, I chuckled, but as everybody who knows Paine knows, and as I’m sure Gopnik knows, Paine arrived in 1774 not in Boston but in Philadelphia, and that’s not a minor difference. While Boston had, of course, been in a longstanding state of particularly active resistance to royal government and parliamentary acts, Philadelphia’s resistance was more recent, drastically different from Boston’s, and undergoing important changes right when Paine showed up. I’ve written endlessly about all that, so I won’t rehash it. Suffice it to say that the Philadelphia resisters who took up Paine on his arrival hadn’t been waiting around to learn about democracy from some secret agent of the Duke of freaking Richmond. In real life, the Duke could have learned a thing or two from them. Paine did, especially about democracy as a mode of action on behalf of the political equality of labor. Gopnik’s Lenin reference is more apt, in the real historical context, than he may know.

It’s by no means uninteresting that the Duke of Richmond, as Gopnik points out, made a motion in Parliament in 1780 for manhood suffrage—removing most property qualifications from the right to vote—because it’s true that the Duke’s position was an advanced position to take, for a member of the ruling elite, in 1780, anywhere; the Adams cousins of Massachusetts, for example, remained dead set against democratizing the vote. It’s unfortunate, therefore, to see Gopnik quoting Allen to the effect that the Duke’s motion “was the first such motion in British history. . . quite probably the first in the modern world.” Gopnik runs away with that idea to make the Duke’s democratic motion the first of its kind in all of Western history, but the original error is Allen’s, not Gopnik’s, and it’s an error not just about Paine and revolutionary Pennsylvania but also about the history of democracy. I still have to see it in context. But the statement as quoted undermines a lot of what Gopnik, anyway, says Allen is saying.

It’s well-known that in a famous series of debates in Putney, England, in 1647, the Levellers called, unsuccessfully, for manhood suffrage, and their stifled demand became a critical element in the Anglo-American heritage that Gopnik rightly thinks we ought to be bringing to our public discourse about the American Revolution. As early as the North Carolina Regulation, which began in the 1760’s, expanding suffrage was made an explicit issue by those who were protesting corruption of American and British government and wealth concentration by American and British landlords. Paine’s Philadelphia cohort already had manhood suffrage well in mind when Paine landed. Most importantly—and most embarrassingly, for Gopnik’s elaboration on Allen’s statement—in the great year of 1776, in the new Pennsylvania constitution, Paine and his cohort made manhood suffrage not just a demand, and not just a motion, but a legal reality.

And that really was a first. Overnight, not only could ordinary men in Pennsylvania vote; they could stand for office, and when they did, the state assembly became a tense mix of working-class and financial interests. The new government also gave a lot of immediate power to local committees, which mingled ordinary people and traditional elites, sometimes explosively. Based in part on ideas about government that Paine set out in “Common Sense”—ideas far more radically democratic than those of the Radical Duke—Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution scandalized John Adams by its “democratical” excess and was overturned, in 1790, by upscale Pennsylvanians who thought like Adams.

And thought like Gopnik. Radically democratic ideas, coming not from a kooky duke imagining democracy emerging at some point in the future, but from ordinary people taking action in the immediate present, can be unsettling—not just to Adams and Gopnik but to me, too. And yet, like it or not, that’s how we got the Declaration of Independence on July Fourth. A mass movement, on the street, overthrew the legitimately elected government of Pennsylvania and put in a new government that not only reversed the mighty province’s position against declaring independence but also undid the “ancient” tie between rights and property for the first time since that tie was established. Anti-Paine revolutionaries like Adams said they were fighting the British to defend the ancient tie, against British violations; Paine-friendlier revolutionaries like Jefferson said so too. But when Paine and the Pennsylvania radicals untied the tie, they were bringing the old, long-frustrated Leveller demand to fruition and casting the revolution against Britain as a populist revolution against privilege in America. That’s what I mean by a class conflict inherent in the U.S. founding.

It’s also an intellectual conflict. Some would call what happened in Pennsylvania’s revolution mob rule; Adams did. Some have even called the results proto-Maoist—not me, but I take the point. “The chatter of cosmopolitan elites is the most reviled of all discourses right now,” Gopnik writes. “But, by reconciling opposing practices,” he goes on to assure his embattled, cosmopolitan-elite readership, “it has often proved the most reliable ally of liberty.” That’s as if persuasive argument ever had anything to do with making America independent—almost as if world-changing events are best brought about by writing for and reading magazine essays (or blogs). Working toward his article’s conclusion, Gopnik expresses with perfect clarity what it all comes down to, for New Yorker politics in general. “Today, some writers eagerly ascribe the shortcomings of America’s founding documents to the treason of the educated elite,” he says, “while refusing to acknowledge that it was only an educated élite that could ever have produced them.”

So I think it’s the educated elite of today that Gopnik and his editors are forever (or “eagerly”) leveraging the national founding to defend. A tactic in that defense is to frame the founding solely in terms of ideas, not action, and to endow the founding elite with all of the important ideas. If you make Paine—that self-taught, peripatetic dropout from the artisan class—nothing but the mouthpiece of a highly educated duke, “Common Sense” finally makes common sense. If you choose to believe that agitation in opposition to colonial elites wasn’t going on in the Atlantic colonies long before Paine and the Duke of Richmond met, if you evaporate the Philadelphia activists’ removing property qualifications for voting, if you erase the Levellers, whom the Adams types were still freaking out about 150 years later, and instead credit the Duke with bringing up manhood suffrage for the first time ever, then you’ve shifted the historical focus back onto the right sort of people. The more relatable sort, from some points of view. All it takes is leaving things out and making things up. If leaving things out and making things up is what’s needed to save an educated elite that supposes itself to be the last bulwark against leaving things out and making things up, then the educated elite really is in trouble.

_________________

Further Reading

The Gopnik article (paywalled).

This is what founding US democracy looked like, sometimes.

The real action is all in this book.