by Jeff Riggenbach
One of the forces involved in the recent heating up of
the perennial American-history wars was the brilliant critical and popular
success, during the 1970s and early 1980s, of the first three books in Gore
Vidal's six-volume[1]"American Chronicle" series of historical
novels about the United States. Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), and Lincoln(1984) were enormous
successes. They proved beyond any doubt that the public would not rise up in
indignation and smite any author who dared to question the motives and the
wisdom of even the most venerated American presidents. They proved that there
was, in fact, a substantial market for just such skepticism about the glorious
American past.
Partisans of the
America-as-pure-and-virtuous-beacon-of-liberty-prosperity-and-peace mythology
attacked Vidal's novels, of course, but Vidal made it quite clear in a couple
of detailed replies to his critics (first published in the New York Review of Books) that he knew at least as much
about the history of the periods he depicted in his novels as any of them did —
PhD's and members of the professoriate though they might be.
Gore Vidal was born with a silver spoon in his mouth
and was educated in expensive private schools in and around Washington DC. He
grew up around politics. His father was a high ranking official in the Franklin
Roosevelt administration, the director of the Bureau of Air Commerce, the
agency known today as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). His maternal
grandfather, who lived in the Vidal family home, was the venerable, sightless
US senator Thomas Pryor Gore (D-Oklahoma), and Vidal recalls the daily ritual
of being sent with car and driver to pick up my grandfather at
the Capitol and bring him home. In those casual days [ca. 1935–1937], there
were few guards at the Capitol — and, again, ["Washington was a small town
where"] everyone knew everyone else. I would wander on to the floor of the
Senate, sit on my grandfather's desk if he wasn't ready to go, experiment with
the snuff that was ritually allotted each senator; then I would lead him off
the floor.[2]
Consider: The first of Vidal's American Chronicle
novels (Burr) was the fifth-biggest fiction bestseller of
1973;[3] it was so successful that three years later the
Book of the Month Club acquired its sequel,1876, "sight
unseen" and before the manuscript had even been completed; and the club's
gamble paid off handsomely, for, upon publication, "1876 quickly went to the top of the
bestseller list."[4] In 1984, when the third volume in the
series, Lincoln, was published, Vidal found that he was
faced with another "huge bestseller," another "critical success,
reinforced by … immense sales."[5] Four years after its first publication, Lincoln was adapted as a made-for-TV movie. In the
'90s all three of these novels (the first three in the series) were confirmed
as modern classics by being reissued in Modern Library editions. The later
volumes in the series enjoyed less spectacular sales than the first three, but
all the novels have sold briskly, and the entire American Chronicle enterprise
has been a profitable one, both for Vidal and for his publishers and producers.
But I get ahead of my story. Let us pause, then, and
examine more closely this American Chronicle series of Vidal's.
I: Burr and Lincoln
Washington DC (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 US 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 US 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,
"Rather than simply taking place after Washington DC —
which covers the years 1937 to 1952 — The Golden Age loops
back to re-cover the same years, 1939 to 1954." 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 "is
the narrative Washington DC might have been
had Vidal written the books chronologically." Thus "You might think
of the new book as an alternative version of the older one." Kloman points
out that "when Vidal published Washington DC in
1967, he had no plan to tell America's story from the Revolutionary War through
the present." Accordingly, he counsels, "now that Vidal has completed
the series, one might just consider it to be six books in length, with Washington DC 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."[6]
In the following pages, I take Kloman's advice: I use
the term "American Chronicle" 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 ("Charlie") 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 77 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 "an alternate American
narrative" in which the founding fathers look somewhat different from the
way most readers are accustomed to seeing them. "Instead 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."[7]
Burr is appalled at what he considers to be
Washington's "incompetence" as a military leader.[8] He notes that Washington "did not read
books" and that though he "was always short of money, he lived
grandly." He looks back on Washington as having been "defective in
grammar and spelling, owing to a poor education" and as having been
"most puritanical." He speaks derisively of our first president as
having been "unable … to organize a sentence that contained a new
thought."[9] He tells Charlie that when "in September
1777 the British out-manoeuvred Washington once again and occupied
Philadelphia,"
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.[10]
Jefferson makes out no better than Washington in
Burr's eye view. "He was the most charming man I have ever known,"
Burr tells Charlie, "as well as the most deceitful." All in all, in
Burr's view (as imagined by Vidal), Jefferson was a prize hypocrite.
"Proclaiming the unalienable rights of man for everyone (excepting slaves,
Indians, women, and those entirely without property)," Burr sneers,
"Jefferson 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."[11]
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. "I do remember hearing someone
comment," he tells Charlie, "that 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." But did he? No. Instead, while Washington's army
suffered at Valley Forge, Jefferson "spent a comfortable winter … at
Monticello where, in perfect comfort and serenity, he was able amongst his
books to gather his ever-so-fine wool."[12] 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.[13]
Not only was Jefferson a coward and a fraud, according
to Burr, he was also "a ruthless man" who "simply 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."[14]
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
"in 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."
Still, as Burr relates it, Jefferson did not advocate
federal action against members of the press who published "false
facts." On the contrary. "As usual, Jefferson had a way around the
difficulty.… 'Since the federal government has no constitutional power over the
press, the states can then devise their own laws.'"[15]
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, "Jefferson's concubine Sally, by whom he had at least five
children." Sally was an illegitimate daughter of John Wayles, Jefferson's
father-in-law, Burr tells Charlie, "which 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."[16]
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 "beyond the reach of
the Constitution." In his defense, Jefferson argued that "on 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." His
political opponents, Jefferson acknowledged, "will 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." Burr's summary of Jefferson's view is succinct and
unsparing. "In other words," he tells Charlie, "if public
opinion is not unduly aroused one may safely set aside the Constitution and
illegally arrest one's enemies."[17]
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 50 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 "anyone who takes up arms — or incites others to take
up arms, against the Federal government," and orders further that those
arrested be held "indefinitely without ever charging them with any
offense." His justification is reminiscent of the one Burr attributes to
Jefferson, who spoke of "the public preservation." "The most
ancient of all our human characteristics is survival," Lincoln tells his
secretary of state, William H. Seward. "In 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." As
Lincoln sees it, he is merely exercising what he calls the "inherent
powers" of the presidency when he takes actions of this kind. And, as he
tells Seward, "An inherent power
… is just as much a power as one that has been spelled out."[18]
Lincoln is not narrated in the first person as Burr is. Rather it is narrated in the third person
— not an "omniscient" 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 "a minority President, elected with less than 40
percent of the total vote."
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.[19]
Vidal's Lincoln, says Donald E. Pease, is
"interested mostly in self-aggrandizement," though his interest in
sex was sufficient in his younger years that he "contracted syphilis from
a prostitute and communicated this disease to his wife and children."[20] To Fred Kaplan, Vidal's Lincoln is "a
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."[21]
This mania for "saving the Union" cannot be
overestimated as a central factor in the motivations and behavior of Vidal's
Lincoln. As Bloom notes, Vidal's Lincoln is "a respecter of neither the
states, nor the Congress, nor the Court, nor the parties, nor even the
Constitution itself."[22] Pease makes the same point when he writes that
"Vidal'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."[23]
Vidal's Lincoln is also no Great Emancipator. Vidal's
Lincoln, as Pease points out, "believes the emancipation of slaves entails
their exportation to the West Indies or Liberia."[24] For, as Kaplan notes, though he is "opposed
to slavery, Lincoln does not believe slavery an issue worth fighting
about."[25] Vidal's Lincoln tells the assembled delegates of
the Southern Peace Conference that met with him shortly after his election that
"I 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." "I have never been an abolitionist," 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 "your 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." His secretary, John Hay, sitting in on the
meeting, reflects that the president "was unshaken in his belief that the
colored race was inferior to the white."
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 "reimburse
the slave-owners" for their freed slaves. This, he tells Washburne,
"will … be a quick way of getting money into the South for
reconstruction." In addition to the money he'll need for that plan, he
adds, "we'll need money to colonize as many Negroes as we can in Central
America." Washburne is somewhat astonished that the president still favors
such a plan. "When you get hold of an idea," he says to Lincoln,
"you don't ever let it go, do you?" Lincoln replies: "Not until
I find a better one. Can you imagine what life in the South will be like if the
Negroes stay?"[26]
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. Frémont
declares martial law in Missouri (a border state) and announces that he will
"confiscate the property of all secessionists, including their slaves, who
were to be freed," Vidal's Lincoln declares "with anguish, to Seward,
'This is a war for a great national idea, the Union, and now Frémont has tried
to drag the Negro into it!'" 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 "what the war is about" is "the principle that
the Union cannot be dissolved, ever." 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 "to the
army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence
of the invader." Vidal's Lincoln does not like Meade's choice of words.
"Of course, Pennsylvania is our soil," he tells Hay. "But 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."[27]
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: "the states in rebellion were out of the
Union and should be treated as an enemy nation's conquered provinces."
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.[28]
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 3 percent of the
current US 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, "Yesterday, at three
in the afternoon, I ordered every US 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." Seward wonders aloud about
"thelegal basis for this seizure," and Lincoln
answers, "The broader powers
inherent in the Constitution." 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, "very
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." 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 "held that Lincoln's war measures were illegal and
unConstitutional [sic] and so far worse than the defection of the Southern
States." 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 "a single-minded
dictator in the White House, a Lord Protector of the Union by whose will alone
the war had been prosecuted" and that "Lincoln had been able to make himself
absolute dictator without ever letting anyone suspect that he was anything more
than a joking, timid backwoods lawyer." 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 "has now done the same thing to Germany that you
tell us Mr. Lincoln did to our country."[29]
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 60s), who has returned to the United States after spending 30 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 US 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 US 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. "I
plan to leave the army the first of the year," Sanford tells Kate late in
1862. "We 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."[30]
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 20. 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
copublisher. She decides to invest in real estate in Georgetown, despite the
fact that it is "still mostly Negro," because "here and there,
18th-century townhouses were being restored by the canny white rich. Caroline
had taken two row houses and knocked them into one."[31]
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
("A. B.") 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:
Through 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 ofEmpire's successor, Hollywood, which was
published in February 1990.[32]
Harry Kloman suggests that Empire is overly "concerned with frivolities,
name-dropping, and gossipy historical deconstruction,"[33] 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.[34]
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 "liberated" from Spain. "I have
always thought," Vidal's Hay says,
"that it was the task of the Anglo-Saxon races,
specifically England, now shrinking, and ourselves expanding, to civilize and
to," Hay took a deep breath and played his best if most specious card,
"Christianize 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."[35]
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. "The European powers are getting ready to divide up
China," he tells McKinley. "We'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."[36]
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. "Have you read Admiral Mahan on
sea-power?" Vidal's Roosevelt demands of Blaise Sanford during an interview.
"Published 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 'empire' because the tender-minded can't bear it."[37] 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. "The 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."[38]
"I speak now only of savages," Vidal's
Roosevelt insists.
"When 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!"[39]
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. "The point,
John, is that we have done something useful for our country. Our fleets can go
back and forth, quickly, between Atlantic and Pacific." Hay is perplexed.
"You see a future so filled with war?" he asks the president. And
Vidal's Roosevelt replies, "Yes, I do.… I also see our own mission, which
is to lead where once England led, but on a world scale."[40]
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 "the German-language press …
has been, from the beginning, disloyal to this country. I would, as a military
necessity, shut all those papers down." Wilson is taken somewhat aback.
"Isn't this — arbitrary?" he asks Roosevelt. "Surely, they are
guaranteed the same freedoms –" But Roosevelt cuts him off. "This is
war, Mr. President. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, shut
down newspapers, and we'll have to do the same…." Nor is this all he
recommends to the startled president. "Many would-be traitors — German
sympathizers — pretend to be peace-lovers, to be — what's their phrase? —
'conscientious 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."[41]
Vidal's Wilson, for his part, a "professional
historian, who preferred the British parliamentary system to the American
executive system," 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 "too few volunteers." He has a solution, though: "We
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." Accordingly, Vidal's Wilson wastes no time in making sure that
"conscription 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 'selective service' in the armed services, which sounded
rather better than, say, cannon fodder in France."[42]
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
the 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.[43]
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 "read off the particulars of
Harding's secret plan," under which "the United States was willing to
scrap thirty capital ships" and "Great Britain, Japan, France and
Italy were invited to rid themselves of close to two million tons of
war-ships."[44]
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 "gamble 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."[45]
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,
"wanted 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."[46]
Making war under such circumstances is repugnant to
Vidal's Hoover. "I would never sacrifice any American life anywhere,"
he states forthrightly, "unless we ourselves were directly
threatened." "People forget," Vidal's Hoover complains,
"that 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."[47]
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
"goes on and on about how he hates war because he has seen war," Vidal's
Hoover declares with evident contempt. "As 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."[48]
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: US 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. "A 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."[49] 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 60 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," Hopkins tells Caroline,
"that we — this administration anyway — will let
England go down. We can always handle the isolationists here at home … with
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 … disguising 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 über Alles."[50]
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 US 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
"largely unsuccessful," 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 "the President has a plan, even
some sort of timetable," and that he is "provoking 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." In that event, if the attacker were Japan, not only would
"the nation … be willing to enter the war," but the United States
would also be involved in the European conflict, "because Germany and
Italy would have to honor their military treaty with Japan."[51]
"It's a very clever game." Gore's one glass
eye had strayed northward, while the blind eye was half shut. "Eighty
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."[52]
Hopkins instructs Caroline on the wisdom of this plan.
"It 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." Even if they
don't blow up MacArthur, however, "there'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…"
Hopkins pauses and Caroline prompts him by asking,
"Then what?"
"Then we go for it," Hopkins replies.
"All of it. And get it."
"What is it?" Caroline
demands, frustrated.
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
"one great blow" 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 United
States–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 the 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 "I believe that it must be the policy of the
United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation
by outside pressure."[54]
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,
"Henry 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."[55]
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, that launched and then prolonged the Cold
War.
Notes
[1] As Harry Kloman writes, The Golden Age "is the narrative Washington, D.C. might have been had Vidal written
the books chronologically." Thus "You might think of the new book as
an alternative version of the older one." Kloman points out that
"[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." Accordingly, he counsels,
now that Vidal
has completed the series, one might just consider it to be six books in length,
withWashington, 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.
(Harry Kloman, "Gore Vidal's American Chronicles:
1967-2000.")
I take Kloman's advice: I use the term "American
Chronicle" 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.
[2] Gore Vidal, "At Home in Washington,
D.C." in At Home: Essays, 1982-1988 (New
York: Random House, 1988), p. 6.
[7] Donald E. Pease, "America and the Vidal
Chronicles" in Gore Vidal: Writer Against the
Grain, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992),
p. 269.
[19] Harold Bloom, "The Central Man: On Gore
Vidal's Lincoln" in Gore Vidal: Writer Against the
Grain, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992),
pp. 223-224.
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