Volume 48, Number 5 · March 29, 2001
The Greatest Generation
By Gordon S. Wood
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Joseph J. Ellis
The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire
Francis Jennings
Cambridge University Press, 340 pp., $54.95; $19.95 (paper)
Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government
Catherine Allgor
University Press of Virginia, 299 pp., $29.95
Not so long ago the generation that fought the Revolution and created the Constitution was thought to be the greatest generation in American history. The Founding Fathers, or the 'Founders,' as our antipatriarchal climate now prefers, were generally considered to be without parallel in American history. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, wrote Henry Steele Commager in 1961, America 'boasted a galaxy of leaders who were quite literally incomparable.' Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and the other revolutionaries, said the historian Adrienne Koch in 1965, 'were a cluster of extraordinary men such as is rarely encountered in modern history.' Until recently few Americans could look back at these revolutionaries and constitution-makers without being overawed by the brilliance of their thought, the creativity of their politics, the sheer magnitude of their achievement. They used to seem larger than life, giants in the earth, possessing intellectual and political capacities well beyond our own.
Review, 5468 words
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