Posted by
Andrews on Sunday, April 20, 2008 4:29:53 PM
Can you tell it is a rainy day from the amount of television I am watching?
Well, this one is about HBO's "John Adams". I have not yet seen enough to draw any conclusions, though the history does seem pretty accurate and free of modernizing touches.
What is interesting is to see the revolution from Adams' perspective. I am afraid that the our history has suffered from something of a Jefferson fetish. Thanks to the admitted brilliance of Jefferson and Madison, the Federalists in general, and Adams in particular, get rather short shrift. Well, Washington gets a pass, though the result is that most children know very little about his federalist sympathies. But while Jefferson is idolized to the point of overlooking his faults, we tend to see Adams and Hamilton as nothing more than foils for the inevitable Jeffersonian victory.
And I say this as huge fan of Jefferson and Madison, and an even bigger fan of Jackson. But I still think we need to know the whole story. The Democratic Republicans had their errors, and the Federalists had their sound arguments, to paint history as nothing but the triumph of the Jeffersonian side is to rob the past of much of its color.
Well, perhaps I will write again after I have seen the whole thing. But now that I mentioned Jackson, I wish someone would do him justice in a similar format. For too long a very erudite and talented man has been painted as a populist dolt. He definitely had his faults, and he played the fool when it helped his cause, but he was far from the hick that many think him to have been.
Now that I think about it, some of the views of Jackson remind me of the views many hold of our current president. And both seem just about as far divorced from fact.