Wood: Past presidents idealized in present day

America's idealization of its founding fathers can be seen in everything from their portraits on U.S. currency to the abundance of scholarship on figures like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, Pulitzer Prizewinning historian Gordon Wood told an overflowing crowd in Dodds Auditorium on Saturday afternoon.

This reverence is a tribute, he said, to the egalitarian values and high moral principles people like Adams and Franklin advocated and upon which the United States was founded.

Wood, a longtime history professor at Brown, was invited to speak as part of the annual Mary Tanner history lecture series in the James Madison Program. His talk was based on his most recent book, "Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founding Fathers Different," published in 2006.

America's obsession with its founders, Wood said, stems from the unique set of beliefs on which it was founded. "To be an American is not to be somebody, but to believe in something," he said. "What we believe in is the beliefs, ideals and values created by these fathers."

But he emphasized that men like Thomas Jefferson were neither demigods nor democrats. "Very much the product of peculiar circumstances in peculiar times," Wood said, the Founding Fathers succeeded in constructing a nation based on Enlightenment ideals on a continent devoid of the socioeconomic constraints of Great Britain.

While British power was concentrated among roughly 400 elite families in the 18th century, American revolutionary political leaders represented a first-generation, "self-created aristocracy based on merit and power rather than hereditary nobility," Wood said.

Almost all of the Founding Fathers lacked these traditional land and blood qualifications, Wood said, adding that even Thomas Jefferson's father would not have been considered refined in his society.

But, Wood said, new liberal conceptions of education, personal character and other man-made criteria for what made someone a "gentleman" meant that even backwoods planter George Washington and newspaper printer Benjamin Franklin were not excluded from political leadership.

"To be a gentleman was to act like a gentleman," Wood said. Free from the strictly hierarchical system of Great Britain but possessing all the qualities of refined cosmopolitanism, being a gentleman in the fledgling United States "meant having all the characteristics that we sum up today as being part of a liberal arts education."

Ultimately, however, many of the values the Founding Fathers held dear were not realized by the political system they helped create, Wood said. The revolutionaries' nearly universal desire for the abolition of slavery, for example, was squelched by a popular sense of the institution's necessity.

Jo Meyer '10, one of the few students who attended Saturday's lecture, said she has attended several Madison Program lectures and appreciated Wood's discussion of the Founding Fathers and his portrait of colonial America.

"I think it's very important for us to know that world and that culture because we live in a society that has a very strong sense of civic religion," Meyer said. As Americans tend to either deify or vilify their founders, it is essential to "discuss the straight facts" before drawing any conclusions, she said.