Reading Life

I was reorganizing one of my book piles, and I was stunned to discover that I have that book on FDR and the Supreme Court, on that big political-Constitutional battle: “Supreme Power” by Jeff Shesol. Very recently, when I felt like opening up a second slot for American history, I was thinking of ordering this book. How funny would that have been? To end up having two copies of the book. Like I have money to burn.

Wait, this story gets worse!

Even before I pick the book up, I am fighting this nervous suspicion. But my fears were right. I made some notes on the book. It turns out that I actually read the damn thing. Wow! It is one thing to buy a book and then forget about it. That is kind of understandable. But to have read the book and to have forgotten than you even bought it! That is a whole new level of dumbassness. Sure, I usually forget what I have read in a book, but not that I have at least read the thing.

It must have been over a few years ago when I read it. Maybe sometime between 2007 and 2009? It was kind of a dead period for me. It was after I lost my main blogging friends and before I got into my book-blogging and the Three Journal. I was lost in a fog trying to figure out what to do with myself, looking for a reason to really want to get out of bed in the morning.

At least I didn’t order the book, again.

I had already started Brandt’s book on FDR, rereading it, for that second slot in my reading schedule. If I ever get around to finishing it, maybe I will reread Shesol’s book for that slot, seeing that I already have it. But I am not sure. The battle over the Supreme Court is great history, but there is so much great history and I have so little time, and I cannot help thinking that if I really liked the book, I would have remembered reading it.

Thomas Jefferson

It is always funny how Wall Street conservatives love to cite Thomas Jefferson as their patriotic saint.

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As members of the Virginia plantation world, Jefferson and Madison had a nearly visceral contempt for market values and tended to denigrate commerce as grubby, parasitic, and degrading. Like landed aristocrats throughout history, they betrayed a snobbish disdain for commerce and financial speculation. Jefferson perpetuated a fantasy of America as an agrarian paradise with limited household manufacturing. He favored the placid, unchanging rhythms of rural life, not the unruly urban dynamic articulated by Hamilton. He wrote, “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural…. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.” For Jefferson, banks were devices to fleece the poor, oppress farmers, and induce a taste for luxury that would subvert Republican simplicity. Strangely enough, for a large slaveholder, he thought that agriculture was egalitarian while manufacturing would produce a class-conscious society.

-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”

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