While Jefferson and Monroe attended William and Mary College, which was intellectually staid, the guide said, Madison went to the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. There he came under the tutelage of John Witherspoon. Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister, born in Scotland and educated at the University of Edinburgh, became President of the College of New Jersey, a Presbyterian institution, in 1768, a year before Madison came there. Under Witherspoon’s guidance, the guide indicated, Madison became imbued with the ideas, ideals, and enthusiasms of the Scottish Enlightenment. (A recent letter in its alumni magazine pointed out Princeton’s iconic Nassau Hall was built because of donations by Scottish Presbyterians.)

Witherspoon would also have shown Madison that enlightenment thought should be expressed in political activity. Witherspoon was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence, signed the Articles of Confederation, and later supported the adoption of the Constitution.

Learning how the Scottish Enlightenment had affected Madison I thought of James Wilson. Wilson, whom I had learned about for an academic project, is largely forgotten now, but he was one of the most influential of our Founding Fathers, and he was the intellectual offspring of the Scottish Enlightenment. Wilson was born in Scotland in 1742 and attended three of the four Scottish universities, St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, where he studied Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. He came to Pennsylvania when he was twenty-four. He signed the Declaration of Independence and was one of the most influential people in the Constitutional Convention. Wilson was on the committee that produced the first draft of the Constitution. He was a leading legal theorist and wrote influential legal articles and books and was one of the original Justices of the Supreme Court. Through him, as with others, flowed Scottish Enlightenment thought into our founding documents.

Hearing how Madison was influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment and thinking again about Wilson’s role made me wonder more generally about the Scottish Enlightenment’s effects on the founding of our country. I have read one book about that Enlightenment, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman. It is quite good, but it is a general study, and I wondered if there was something more specific about how those Scottish thinkers affected our country’s foundations. Let me know if you are aware of a good study on that topic. The visit to the presidential homes certainly made me think that in important ways we owe at least partial thanks for our country to the Scots.

From the European perspective, the United States was a young country during its formation period. While that was true, I was struck during our visits to the Virginian presidential homes by the deep American roots of our early presidents. None was a recent arrival; each could be classified as having come from old stock. Washington’s great-grandfather came to Virginia from England in the 1650s. Jefferson’s ancestors also came from England during the seventeenth century. I am not sure about Madison’s grandfather, but Madison’s father was born in Virginia. Monroe’s great-grandfather emigrated from Scotland to Virginia at about the same time as Washington’s great-grandfather had. In addition, the second President also had long roots in America. John Adams’s great-grandfather moved to Massachusetts from England around 1640.

Of course, there were others of the Founding Fathers who had come to America more recently—Alexander Hamilton from the West Indies and Thomas Paine from England, for example. But our first presidents all had long and deep roots in America. Was this somehow important for the founding of our country? Did a person naturally feel themselves more of an American when their ancestors had been in the New World for three or four generations? Did it take decades and decades to question whether the British government was the best for a different land and an increasingly different society?  It was striking to me that in that young America all of our first Presidents had old American families. Have historians discussed this?

The Virginia dynasty had roots deep in the New World, but they were still influenced by European ideas. Much is made of Jefferson’s library, and it was not just for show. He read those volumes. And the books were not the eighteenth-century equivalent of Jack Reacher novels, but covered philosophy, botany, biology, agriculture, history, astronomy. I wondered how many modern American leaders have done the equivalent reading.

Jefferson was not alone. Washington and Monroe both had large libraries as did Madison. The guide at Montpelier indicated that Madison, recognizing that the United States needed a better form of government to replace the Articles of Confederation, studied all sorts of materials, from histories of Greece and Rome to modern philosophers, to be prepared to help fashion a new constitution.

John Locke is often cited, surely correctly, as an influence on Jefferson. Separation of powers is a central tenet of our Constitution, and Montesquieu is often credited with formulating that concept. But the European influence was more pervasive than that. The Virginia dynasty came of age in an enlightenment era that believed in human reason, rejected authority, and valued empirical knowledge. The Montpelier guide stressed how much Madison was influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment that was then flourishing.

(Continued on June 8)

“This is a book for the servantless cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, timetables, children’s meals, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat.” Simone Beck, Louisette Berthoile, Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

“Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface.” Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety.

“In the beginning, nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.” Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

“We went there for everything we needed.” J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar: A Memoir.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

“Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet.” Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air.

“With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past.” George Eliot, Adam Bede.

“No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton.” Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything.

“On the burnt-out end of a July day in Southwest Texas, in a crossroads community whose only economic importance had depended on its relationship to a roach paste factory the EPA had shut down twenty years before, a young man driving a car without window glass stopped by an abandoned blue-and-white filling station that had once sold Pure gas during the Depression and was now home to bats and clusters of tumbleweed.” James Lee Burke, Rain Gods: A Novel.

“History has not been kind to Jefferson Davis.” James M.  McPherson, Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief.

As much as I enjoyed the recent HBO documentary about the pro wrestler, Andre the Giant, I was disappointed at its leaving out the part of Andre’s life I find most intriguing—Samuel Beckett and Andre knew each other. Beckett owned a place in the French countryside near Andre’s home when Andre was growing up. Although we may never know much about this relationship, it is documented that Beckett did drive Andre to school. I first learned about this relationship from a two-character play Sam and Dede, Or My Dinner with Andre the Giant that I saw in a 50-seat theater a few years ago.

According to the play, Andre was too big for the school bus, and Beckett, paying off a debt to Andre’s father, offered to drive the boy to school in his truck. During the drives, the two mostly spoke about cricket, which both played.  While there are sources to support these facts, I am guessing that the most of the play was based on a playwright’s speculations. In the play, the two became friends, a friendship that lasted even after Andre had become a huge star and Beckett had become a worldwide literary figure. They have wide-ranging conversations about art and storytelling. Beckett is intrigued with professional wrestling, and Andre is intrigued with the lack of traditional storytelling in Beckett’s work.

Pro wrestling, unlike much of Beckett’s work, has stories, and it has writers. Beckett is interested in wrestling; wrestling has writers; Beckett is a writer. What if, I could not help wonder, Andre had gotten Becket to write for wrestling.  I don’t pretend to be a Beckett expert, but from what I have seen, he seemed concerned with the absurd, and surely so wrestling meets that standard. Perhaps he could have had Andre alone in the ring “calling out” someone he was “feuding” with. Beckett might have had a solo spotlight on Andre who says, “Big Show, if you want to take my title come out here.” Then for three minutes nothing but silence. Andre repeats his challenge. Another three silent minutes and another challenge. Another three minutes and Big Show appears at the arena’s entrance. He does not utter a word. Three minutes of silence. Big Show laughs. Three more silent minutes. The lights go out. When the lights return, neither wrestler is there. The giant television comes on. It says, “Waiting with Andre.” The TV goes off. And the audience wonders, What just happened? What did that mean?

In Beckett’s Endgame, two men in trash cans converse. In professional wrestling, men frequently bash each other with metal garbage cans. What could Beckett have done with wrestlers and those props? We will never know, of course, but I feel a bit cheated.

Little is known about the relationship between Beckett and Andre other than the fact that one existed. The possibilities are so intriguing; I wished that the documentary had probed it.

Keeping in touch with my low-culture side, I watched the recent HBO documentary about Andre the Giant. I took it with a grain of salt because it seems to have been done with the cooperation of the major wrestling organization, Vince McMahon’s WWE, and my gut tells me that it would be foolish to treat a wrestling promoter’s words as veracious. Still, I enjoyed it.

Andre Roussimoff, born in 1946 in Molien, France, a small farming village, started to grow excessively in his teenage years. And he continued to grow and then grow some more. Perhaps if his condition had then been diagnosed, it could have been treated. Only as an adult, however, was he diagnosed as having acromegaly, a disorder of excess growth hormone, often caused by a tumor in the pituitary gland. Andre just continued to grow.

Andre’s major fame comes from professional wrestling, although those who aren’t attracted to this spectacle may know him as the actor who portrayed the lovable giant Fezzik in the movie The Princess Bride. For a decade or two, he was probably the biggest worldwide star in professional wrestling, and the documentary does a reasonable job in describing that ascent as well as the ascent of pro wrestling itself from small, regional organizations to the dominant national WWE of today.

The film was filled with anecdotes about Andre—his strength, his gentleness, his attractiveness to women (although something was left out here), his legendary drinking, his graciousness, his jovialness, how much he liked to laugh, his good friendships. The documentary also provided glimpses of hardships and pain.

At the beginning of his career, because each pro wrestling operation was a regional attraction, Andre’s life was one of constant travel. He was on the road, the documentary said, for 300 nights a year. This much travel would be uncomfortable for anyone, but it is hard to imagine how difficult it must have been for him. The HBO production had a clip of Andre saying that he could never be sure that a hotel would have a bed big enough for him. You can’t trust wrestling statistics, but he was billed as 7 feet 4 inches tall and weighing 520 pounds. Those numbers were probably exaggerated, but he was huge as was clear in films when he stood next to others or held a normal-sized object in his hand. One of the interviewees pointed out that Andre took frequent fourteen-hour flights to Japan but that he could not fit into an airliner’s restroom. Curtains would have to be drawn in the back of the plane and he would urinate into a bucket that would then be emptied into the toilet by someone else. Would you ever get used to that? Another clip of Andre pointed out something I never thought about. He said that society now tries to make accommodations for the blind and disabled, but we have not tried to accommodate the giants among us.

There were many stories about his legendary drinking. On a routine night he would drink twenty-four bottles of beer or seven or eight bottles of wine. Some days and nights, he drank over 100 beers or three or four cases of wine. These stories were told in amazed, almost admiring tones, and it all seemed faintly humorous, but then one of his nonwrestling friends said that part of the reason he drank so much was his pain. His joints and back could not handle his growth, and as the years went on he had trouble even walking.

Andre lived knowing that his condition meant that he would die young. Nothing indicated that he lived regularly with morbid thoughts, but how could he not?

Perhaps all this was best summed up by a friend who said that every so often Andre, world-famous and rich, would simply say to him, “Sometimes I wish I would be you. I wish I could go to the corner store without being noticed.”

Andre died of heart failure alone in a Paris hotel room when he was 46.

(concluded onJune1)

James Madison was instrumental in the formation of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, but we are beholden to his wife, Dolley, for another one of his important constitutional contributions. Madison took notes during the Constitutional debates. He attended every session and noted every speech, he claimed, except the most inconsequential. Scholars have relied on Madison’s efforts to understand the flow of Constitutional proposals, counterproposals, and compromises. Madison’s notes have been invaluable for understanding our Constitution, but we should be grateful for Dolley for their publication.

Although Madison was meticulous in taking and keeping the notes, he merely stored them for most of his life. It was only after his Presidency, when he had retired to Montpelier, that he started to put them into publishable form. Dolley aided him in this, but after Madison died, Dolley finished the project.

It was Dolley who got them published. In doing so, she may have been thinking more about her widowed poverty than about future scholars, but she convinced Congress to buy Madison’s constitutional notes, and they were published in 1837, on the fiftieth anniversary of the constitutional debates.

Any law student knows that in that half century before Madison’s notes were published, the Supreme Court handed down major decisions about the Constitution that helped set the path of our country. Many constitutional scholars today urge that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is to enforce what it originally meant. The late publication of Madison’s notes, however, highlights that the early Supreme Court Justices rendered their opinions without a basic source for understanding the original intentions of the framers of the Constitution. If you read those early decisions, you will realize that the Supreme Court was not interpreting the Constitution through an originalist lens. If you read Madison’s notes, you will not find the framers mandating that “originalism” was the proper to way view the Constitution. If you delve further, you will find that “originalism” is largely a late twentieth century invention by a few constitutional scholars and judges. “Originalism” is not supported by the original intentions of the framers and adopters of the Constitution.  Ironic.

Dolley Madison lived in an age that knew little about diseases such as cholera and yellow fever, and contagions swept off many, as they did in Dolley’s first family. The young were particularly vulnerable, and it was quite common for only half the children in a family to survive until adulthood. Death was known from an early age as brothers and sisters often died. Grief was common.

Early deaths still happen, of course, but not as frequently, and that made me wonder about the effects on the psyches of those early Americans. I have heard it said today, “She never got over the death of her son.” “He never got over the loss of his little sister.” But back then, the majority of the people experienced such a death. If such an event today affects the psyche of the parent or sibling, didn’t it have similar effects back then? How did such losses affect not only the individuals but a society where they were common? Did the prevalence of early deaths make that society fundamentally different from ours?

Dolley, although she had to suffer the tremendous grief of the early deaths of a child and a husband, did not endure what many other women of her era did—the constant cycle of childbirth and nursing and childhood deaths.  Martha Jefferson was twenty-three when she married Thomas Jefferson. In the next ten years, she had six children. Only two survived more than a few years. Weakened by the frequent childbirths, Martha was dead ten years after she was married.

The younger of Martha Jefferson’s two surviving children, Mary, married and bore three babies, only one of whom survived into adulthood. Weakened by the last childbirth, Mary Jefferson Eppes died when she was but twenty-five.

The other surviving child, Martha Jefferson Randolph, lived until she was 64 and gave birth thirteen times with eleven of the children surviving to adulthood, but the stories of Thomas Jefferson’s wife and their younger daughter were common ones of the times. How did it affect the psyche of the women of the age that they were expected to have large families knowing the probability that they would suffer the heartbreak of a dead infant? And how did it affect them knowing that the frequent childbirths could bring an early end to their own life? How did this psychic weight affect those around them?

(Continued on May 28)

On our recent visits to the homes of early Virginian presidents, our guides and the exhibits revealed that each of those presidents held views opposing slavery. Although Washington never publicly condemned the institution, in private communications he indicated that he opposed slavery and said that it was morally wrong. Jefferson stated that slavery harmed both the enslaved and the owners, and he proposed gradual emancipation. Madison at the Constitutional Convention advocated an immediate cessation of the importation of slaves. Monroe labeled slavery a “blight.” Even so, each owned slaves and benefited from the institution. On the visits, I wondered again about the conflict between their words and their actions. But on this trip, I also learned more about Dolley Madison and for the first time I considered her intellectual journey.

I had known only that Dolley Madison was married to James Madison and that she was a famous for her social skills. The guide at Montpelier confirmed her ability to draw people out and to get her guests talking with each other even when they were political enemies. The guide also told the spouse and me other things about her that we had not known.

She was born in North Carolina to Quaker parents, Mary and John Payne, Jr., and Dolley was raised a Quaker. The prosperous family moved to a Virginia plantation when Dolley was an infant, but in 1783, when she was fifteen, her father, inspired by Revolutionary War ideals and his Quaker faith, freed all his slaves and moved the family to Philadelphia, where he failed as a merchant. In a short time, the family went from prosperity to penury.

When twenty-two, Dolley married John Todd, a Quaker lawyer in Philadelphia. Two sons quickly followed, but when the youngest boy, William, was three months old a virulent yellow fever epidemic hit Philadelphia. Dolley’s husband and her son died on the same day, and her husband’s mother and father died shortly thereafter. Dolley’s father had died a year before and her mother had moved to Virginia to live with Dolley’s sister. The twenty-five-year-old Dolley, without means of support, was alone in Philadelphia with a young son to support.

Along came James Madison. The federal government was then meeting in Philadelphia, and Madison represented Virginia in the House of Representatives. The story has it that James was introduced to Dolley by Aaron Burr, Madison’s college classmate. Less than a year after her first husband died, Dolley married James Madison, who was seventeen years older than she and had not been married before. Dolley’s young son, Payne (really John Payne), became part of the Madison household, but Dolley and James had no children of their own. This reminded me that George Washington also married a widow who already had had children. George and Martha Washington, like James and Dolley Madison, had no biological children of their own. Clearly Martha Washington and Dolley Madison were fertile so the failure to have children seems to have rested with George and James. I wondered if there was any significance in that fact.

Dolley and James stayed in Philadelphia until, in 1800, the federal government moved to that literal swampland that became the city of Washington. The Madisons lived in that new town until 1817, as James first served as Secretary of State under President Jefferson and then two terms as the country’s fourth President. After his retirement James and Dolley moved fulltime to the Madison family home, Montpelier, a large plantation with many slaves.

Hearing this, I wondered what Dolley truly thought about slavery. Did she think about her various families’ different relationships to slavery? Her father felt so strongly about the institution that he freed his slaves and thereby completely altered his and his family’s life. Without slaves, Dolley’s life must have changed radically from the wealth and comfort offered by a Virginia plantation to the poverty of a failed Philadelphia merchant life. Did she resent what her father had done or had her Quaker faith imbued her with same principles as her father? Did she, too, see slavery as evil and in contradiction to the ideals of the Revolution?

She and her first husband had no slaves, but what was her reaction when she learned that Madison had household slaves in Philadelphia? Or when she realized that her new beau owned hundreds of slaves at Montpelier? Of course, she may not have been in much of a position to object to Madison’s slaveholding, but somehow, as did many others in this era, including Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, she must have made an accommodation with that institution.

After James Madison died, Dolley Madison was again in poverty. Part of the reason was her son. Payne never “found” himself, we were told. He never married nor had a sustained career. He flitted from one enterprise to another running up debts, which James Madison paid. As a result, Madison mortgaged Montpelier. After Madison died, Dolley moved back to Washington and had Payne manage the plantation, but he did so disastrously, and Montpelier had to be sold shortly after he took charge.

After hearing Payne’s story of never being married and deeply unhappy, I wondered if he had been gay. I said something to the spouse, and she had had a similar thought. Of course, I have no real knowledge that he was, but if Payne was gay, what was his life like? Would it be surprising that he was deeply unhappy and became an alcoholic?

Dolley not only sold Montpelier, she also sold all but a few of Madison’s slaves whom she took to Washington. Her poverty continued, however, and she periodically sold her household slaves to maintain her comfort. Although she was revered in Washington, abolitionists denounced her for these sales, especially because they happened in Washington, the nation’s capital. How did Dolley feel about these criticisms?

(Continued on May 25)

He was far more educated than his formal education would suggest. A high school diploma ended the father’s educational credentials, but he knew lots about history and geography and physics and politics and sports. He knew things about words that few knew. He taught me, correctly, that the preferred pronunciation for “err” was ur not air. The noun was air-ur, but the verb was ur. (This made me realize that there was a certain irony whenever someone says, “To air is human.”) He made few grammatical mistakes and got upset whenever a letter from one of his kids mailed from college had one.

I don’t how he learned facts about the moon or the physics of archery or the importance of Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech. It is entirely possible that a high school education in his day was at a much higher level than it is today, but I think what was behind his surprising knowledge was that he simply liked to learn. However, I am somewhat puzzled what he used for sources. He did not read books. (When I was well into adulthood, the father visited me in New York, and we walked to the Brooklyn Bridge. I told him that there was a very good book about the Bridge’s construction, and he took my copy of The Great Bridge by David McCullough when he went home. A month later, he sent it back to me. I found a note from him tucked inside: “I read the whole book.” It was the only book that I ever knew he read.) Other than Reader’s Digest, some golf publications, and maybe True, he seldom looked at any of the magazines that were in the house. On the other hand, he was an avid reader of newspapers. Two came to us daily plus another one, heavy on Wisconsin politics, came weekly. It isn’t just nostalgia when I say newspapers were better back then. You could learn more from them than today. The father certainly did.

He knew, however, that his learning was limited. His regret at not having a college education was evident. I asked the brother about memories from our childhood, and one of his replies was how the father stressed the importance of a college education. If you had asked me when I was four or five, I would have told you that I was going to college. Perhaps that may not seem remarkable, but many of my father’s friends did not have even a high school diploma. Some of their children, my contemporaries, did not finish high school. Their parents may have stressed a good job, but that could have meant being a tool and die maker or a bookkeeper, but they did not stress formal education. The father did. There was little doubt that his three children were going to college, and that had to make him something of an outlier in his social circles.

He sacrificed for our educations. He got a second mortgage on our quite modest house to help finance our educations, but he never mentioned that to us. I only learned about it much later. Sending his kids to college was not an easy thing, but he was not a father who reminded his children of all the sacrifices he had made for them.

We were told the importance of a college education time and again, and the sister, the brother, and I all got good college and post-college educations. He never said it, but surely the father must have felt that if he had gone to college, he would have had a better job with more income. We were not told, however, to get a college education to make sure that we were ready for a good job. It was not go to college and get trained as an accountant or a schoolteacher or for a marketing career. He never suggested that we should treat college as a high level vocational school. The chief point to the education was simply to learn as much as we could about . . .everything.

I, too, like to learn. I am proud of that and think that quality helps define me. I want to believe that it one of my best innate qualities. But perhaps it is not something I discovered for myself. Perhaps I got it from him.

I asked why would someone name their daughter Chastity? Wouldn’t that lead to jokes as she grew up? Would anyone name their daughter Promiscuous? The daughter looked at me intently and said, “Some people are named Randy.”

I heard the President speak against gun-free zones. Does that mean that people can bring handguns and semi-automatic rifles with bump stocks into the White House?

Isn’t it un-American to be all excited about a British royal wedding? Why is it that friends who mock those who follow the Kardashians spend a lot of time learning about the royals?

“Fathers have become sympathetic, and kiss their grown sons when they feel like it, and who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.” William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

The spouse says that she can’t get into Frank Sinatra because she can’t sing along with him. Even so, she is enthralled by Ella Fitzgerald.

A friend who grew up in Oklahoma told me that at every high school football game and other sporting events he attended growing up, the crowd, after the Star-Spangled Banner, sang the showtune Oklahoma. I wonder if all this singing of a Broadway song is the reason why so many gay people come from Oklahoma.

I was heading to the escalator at a local Target. A man carrying more stuff than I offered to let me go first, but I insisted that he proceed.  When I got to the escalator with him in front, I realized that the escalator was not functioning.  I said to him, “But I expected you to get it to work.”  He immediately replied, “That’s just what my wife says.”

“In [her] worldview, it seems that one has the police to protect one’s property, Rush Limbaugh to protect one’s pride, and God to take care of the rest.” Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.

When I first learned to type, I was told to leave two spaces after a period. Then with computers, I learned that it was now proper to leave only one space at the end of a sentence. I have tried to adopt that new style and usually, but not always, succeed.  But in the last month I have seen reports of a study that has concluded that it is better for readers if there are two spaces. Now I am just confused.