All nations are shaped by the thoughts, dreams and ambitions of their founders. For the generations that follow these men exult them, elevating their beliefs and their deeds until they are legend, a reality which ensures that their fundamental ideals are perpetuated down through time, even unto the present day. Naturally, as decades become centuries, there are more and more disagreements over what these founders intended, as cultural dislocation causes the meaning of their words to be dissipated by the winds of time, but we still try to live up to the standard they set which makes of them creatures of endless fascination. What was their vision? And how would their views have changed in the face of a rapidly evolving world? Short of availing ourselves of a time machine, we will never know, but we can sift among their letters and their musings for clues, something Ms. Wulf does here with mixed success.
The Founding Fathers of the United States of America are giants of history. The power and the resonance of their names exceeds virtually every one of their contemporaries, even those most royal. And yet, thanks to the success of their glorious experiment, Jefferson and Adams, Madison and Hamilton, Washington and Franklin, commoners all, are the names celebrated in books and memorialized by monuments, their actions having helped to usher in an entirely new world free of the decrepitude of authoritarianism in all its forms.
But who were these men? And what influenced them while they were shaping their legendary ideas? Summoning their journals and their proclamations, interpreting their symbols and their analogies, Founding Gardeners argues that the Founding Fathers filtered their experiences through the lens of environmentalism, a naturalistic approach to the world that began at home and extended out to the rest of the world. From the plantations they so assiduously cultivated to the farmers they hailed as heroes, they celebrated ones connection to the earth, describing it as the most profound and moral partnership man could forge. When all else is uncertain and troublesome, when temptation lurks behind every corner, working the soil will never steer a good man wrong.
Though too narrow in scope and too deprived of analysis, Founding Gardeners is a fascinating read. Ms. Wulf draws upon the copious correspondence of America's legends to establish both their connection to the land that gave them a second life, free of the aristocratic strictures of the old world, and to describe the ways in which these men manifested from this connection a code of conduct, for themselves and the world, that they considered upstanding. In this, Ms. Wulf is most thorough, excavating declarations and obsessions about the earth that seem downright radical by today's standards. Were one to present these quotes, stripped of attribution, and ask the public to guess who spoke them, surely their most common answer would be treehuggers and Gaia-worshippers, minds without any grasp of the complexities of the modern world which brings us to the book's central problem.
It is difficult to imagine how the views of these founders are relevant to our era. Ms. Wulf claims to have written the book after journeys across America's landscapes inspired her to investigate what the Founders thought of the land to which they'd devoted themselves. But it is nearly impossible to read her work here and not imagine that she sought to demonstrate the degree to which modern society has deeply drifted from the ideals the Founders had for the country they birthed. This is a point worth making; for if we're to celebrate these men for their vision and their views, then we have to take in their environmentalism as well. And yet, Ms. Wulf at no point acknowledges the extent to which the intervening centuries have transformed the world. In the time of the Founders, America claimed a population of ten million. Today, that number is 315 million, nearly a 32-fold increase that does not even come close to representing the manifest change that industrialism and technology has wrought upon a crowded planet. This needs to be said. We cannot go back to what we were. Nor should we wish to. That world is as unchanging as it is rife with illness.
There's much here to admire. Ms. Wulf has perhaps overemphasized the role the land played in the lives of these men, but in highlighting it she has humanized them in ways both fascinating and endearing. But if Founding Gardeners wished to be more than a piece of nostalgia, it needed to confront the question of how the thoughts and dreams of the Founders could operate in our world, not theirs. (3/5 Stars)
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