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America will always fear Caesar Gore Vidal: ‘Burr’

Hamilton tried to steal the 1800 election. Hamilton/Joan Marcus


August 17, 2022   6 mins

In my own unreliable cultural memory, the age of Hamilton enthusiasm in American life belongs emphatically to Barack Obama’s presidency in its optimistic phase — to the last period of unabashed liberal patriotism and confidence.

In reality, though, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical didn’t premiere until early in 2015, just four short months before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator and inaugurated the age of populism. This means that Hamilton enthusiasm was partially a lagging indicator, and partially just something for stunned liberals to desperately grasp onto, a thread running backward to the cosmopolitan American future they had lost.

I do not come to bury this kind of fandom: the Miranda musical is terrific no matter its ideological baggage. But it still might have been more intellectually productive if the Trump era had inspired its fans to turn from Miranda’s version of the Founding to the one found in Gore Vidal’s 1973 novel Burr.

Burr already had one cultural moment, dropping originally amid the squalor of Watergate, when its dose of cold-eyed iconoclasm was well-received by critics and bookbuyers alike. But today the novel can be read or re-read with new eyes, outside the long shadow cast by its late author’s famous media persona, and in a landscape where its vision has just as much to offer.

That vision is cynical on the surface. Vidal retells the story of the Founding era from the perspective of what one of Aaron Burr’s biographers called the “Fallen Founder” — the almost-president of 1800, the slayer of Alexander Hamilton in their 1804 duel, the man tried for treason for a supposed scheme to detach the western states from the Union.

The treason trial ended in acquittal but also ended Burr’s public political career; he bounced around Europe unhappily in search of patronage and then ended up back in New York City, where he lived quietly as a lawyer until a late marriage to a wealthy widow in 1837. That’s the point at which the novel picks up, through the agency of its narrator, Charles Schuyler, a young journalist on the make who befriends the aged Burr but also agrees to betray him, by gathering evidence intended to prove that the disreputable killer of Hamilton and famous ladies’ man is also the secret father of Vice President Martin Van Buren, whose pending ascent to the presidency Schuyler’s patrons hope to block.

With this hope in mind, the journalist induces the aging Burr to share his own unfinished memoirs, granting us first-person flashbacks to the Revolutionary War and early republic, in which Burr describes his own rise and fall while settling accounts with all his former friends and rivals.

Compared to the pieties of conservative founder-worship or even of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, these portraits can seem savage. George Washington is an incompetent general who, as president, obsesses over his own quasi-royal dignity. Hamilton, of course, is everything that he accused Burr of being: A man of vaulting ambition, eager for aristocratic style and monarchical power, “capable of any illegality including a military coup”, who actually engaged in an attempt to steal the 1800 election. (Vidal’s Burr writes: “I suspect that when Hamilton looked at me he saw, in some magical way, himself reflected. And so if one is an embryo-Caesar, accuse the looking-glass of that high treason and divert thereby the wrath of the plebes.”)

Finally Jefferson, in Burr’s telling, is expedience and ambition personified — a man who had the gift “at one time or another to put with eloquence the ‘right’ answer to every moral question”, even as in practice “he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculated to bring him power”. A man whose principles committed him to an agrarian and decentralised confederacy, but whose presidency settled “with suspicious ease” on empire-building and executive power. A better Napoleon than Napoleon himself, since his empire-building in the vast Louisiana territory actually endured.

As readers we need not accept that Burr-the-narrator is reliable in all these details, or buy all of his extensive self-justifications. We only have to accept his unique observer’s position, as a man interested in his own honour and prospects but not especially keen on any grand ideological project, at a time when one of history’s grandest ideological projects — the age of revolution — was getting underway.

From that perspective, Burr’s account is cynical and deflating relative to mythmakers and ideological historians — and one of the points of setting the novel’s framing narrative in the 1830s is to see how quickly American mythmaking took hold. But even through the eyes of the Fallen Founder there is no escaping the fact that what he describes is a political success story: a republic established and then expanded, various disasters and civil wars avoided, the Caesarist appetites of even the most powerful figures checked and limited, and at least some revolutionary ideals put into political practice.

Indeed, the novel’s Burr often circles back to acknowledge as much. All his barbed comments about Washington culminate in the observation that: “He was the supreme creator of his union … [whose] powerful will and serpentine cunning made of a loose confederation of sovereign states a strong federal government graven to this day in Washington’s sombre Roman imperial image.” His war with Hamilton doesn’t conceal his partial liking for his rival, and his sneers at the self-made immigrant double as an acknowledgment of the Horatio Alger qualities celebrated on Broadway.

Even Jefferson, Burr’s final enemy and the instigator of his treason trial, is presented as, well, what he was — a dreadful hypocrite, with a tangle of competing motivations and ideals slicked over by self-interest, but also a remarkably effective politician who adapted himself to the new republic’s presidency rather than being carried into disasters by his radical inclinations.

So what is the novel’s un-cynical message? Perhaps that politics is an always unfinished and ambiguous vocation, whose moments of moral clarity are inherently exceptional, and whose normal workings require a constant balancing-act between idealism and realism, private probity and public vision, the necessary and the possible.

This balance needs to be struck within the individual statesman, first. The reader will observe that Burr falters and falls, relative to the other Founders, not because he’s worse and they’re better, but because he has the wrong proportions: too much concern for his private honour, which makes him miss crucial opportunities and also carries him into the fateful duel, and not quite enough concern for public ideals and great causes, which makes him an insufficiently inspiring leader for any of the new country’s clashing factions.

But then, in good Madisonian terms, the balance also needs to be struck between competing statesmen. The great good fortune of America in the Revolutionary era, in Vidal’s portrait, was not that all its leaders were uniquely public-spirited but rather that their talents and rivalries interacted in such a way as to mostly stabilise and strengthen the young country. Which is to say, while everyone was accusing everyone else of being a monarchist or Caesar in the making, the republic took form and proved stronger than any individual or faction.

This brings us to the book’s relevance for our own political era, in which accusations of incipient autocracy fly as freely as they did in the United States of 1800. There is a certain relief in recognising this similarity. It’s a reminder, among other things, that periods of stable consensus politics are almost as exceptional as moments of total moral clarity, and that the people who have constantly asserted this-is-not-normal about some feature of the age of populism are mistaken. It’s quite normal for small-r republican politics to be shadowed by the fear of tyranny, corrupted elections, misinformation, destabilising foreign influence, the fate of Rome. (Before there was the reductio ad Hitlerum there was the reductio ad Rubicon — and perhaps the exhausted response: “A Catiline-conspiracy analogy, again, really?”)

These similarities also hint that the politics of the late-18th and 19th centuries may be more relevant to our own fragmented era than the mass movements and ideological tyrannies of the early 20th century. The category to which Burr belongs, the political adventurer — the none-too-principled but also none-too-ideological figure seizing opportunities as they come to him — seems especially relevant to the rise of Trump or, for that matter, Boris Johnson. And of course Andrew Jackson, hovering in the wings of Burr, remains the crucial antecedent for all American populism, past, present and yet to come.

But to the extent that aspects of our own era can be glimpsed in Vidal’s vision of the American Founding, the recognition also brings with it a sense of the depressing difference. We have the adventurers, the fears of Caesarism, the conspiracy theories and fake news, but the qualities of leadership and vision that Burr grudgingly acknowledges in his rivals seem altogether absent. Instead of vaulting ambition counteracting vaulting ambition, our adventurers stand out, clownishly, amid a landscape of greying mediocrity. This is far less dangerous than the alternative, but it is a sign of decay rather than life.


Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist and a National Review film critic. His latest book is The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. He also writes on Substack.

DouthatNYT

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David Jennings
David Jennings
2 years ago

It is always a pleasure to read Ross Douthat. This article is another example of his providing singular information, context and analysis. A pity he is ensconced in the pages of the NYT where his talents are lost on a readership that wears blinders to better travel at high speed down the road of progressive causes, while those of us who appreciate his writing and analysis have sought the broader vision of more honourable publications. Perhaps Unherd could tempt him to immigrate to different (virtual) pages?

Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
2 years ago
Reply to  David Jennings

The NYT did not advertise “The City and The Pillar”
No Gore Vidal was not a small r Republican
he was a democrat.

John Ramsden
John Ramsden
2 years ago

It’s a shame the current US leadership don’t seem to be as familiar with ancient Roman history as the Founding Fathers doubtless were.
One lesson they would know, from the career of Julius Caesar among others, is that threatening charismatic and popular politicians with law suits and in effect trying to “destroy” them politically, may force them or their followers to resort to more extreme measures if only for their own defence.
Also, making a big long drawn out meal out of political demonstrations simply entrenches differences and keeps them fresh in peoples’ minds. One day the Roman forum would be littered with bodies and running blood, but a week later everything was back to normal and no more was said about the earlier unpleasantness.
In the 1790s the British Prime Minister William Pitt Jr out walking in London was chased by a mob baying for his blood, and only narrowly escaped with his life. But as far as I know, there were no elaborate enquiries or prosecutions subsequently. Everyone, including Pitt, just moved on.
If only these foolish Democrats, dwelling on what by any standards was clearly a very small element of misbehaviour in an overwhelmingly peaceful demo, were as pragmatic. In the long run, all their legalistic pompous posturing and carry on will obviously do more harm than good.
John Ramsden
https://highranges.com

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
2 years ago
Reply to  John Ramsden

The Pitt you’re referring to wasn’t a “junior”; he was his father’s second son. Therefore, he was known in Parliament as Pitt the Younger. And, I have it on good authority that he wrote dreadful poetry, wondered why nice girls hated him, and endured hot crumpets between his lower cheeks . . .

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago

He also “liked the bottle” as we say!

Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
2 years ago
Reply to  John Ramsden

Yes they think the Rubicon is a Jeep !o!

Matt Hindman
Matt Hindman
2 years ago

Hamilton was always my least favorite of America’s Founding Fathers. While the Federalist Papers are lauded over in the American political sphere, the Anti-Federalist Papers written by those who opposed the creation of a powerful central government were just as important. The vison of Hamilton and Madison would have looked nothing like the United States system of government. The Anti-Federalists and their stiff opposition against a federal government are responsible for much of the checks and balances in the American system of government as well as the Bill of Rights. The two are essential reading if you want to understand the United States system of government (as opposed to revisionist garbage like the 1619 Project). If you want to read the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers I would recommend finding a free audio version online (they are long) and alternating between the two of them so you can enjoy the two sides arguing at one another. Also, the oh so polite and oh so creative ways they constantly find to insult each other are great.
If you want to find out more about Hamilton’s shadier side I would recommend The Hamilton Hustle by Matt Stoller
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/hamilton-hustle-stoller

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
2 years ago

I’d say the point about the Founders is that everyone of them is indispensible. Washington as the man on the white horse that went home, twice. Madison the architect of the Constitution. Hamilton the guy that understood central banking and set up the National Debt. Jefferson the guy with the pretty words. Franklin the guy that picked the pocket of the French government.
But Burr? I’d say his claim to fame is that, if Hamilton had lived, our Alexander might have got himself into a bit of insurrectionary trouble down the road. And as we all know, that is the worst thing in the world.

Last edited 2 years ago by Christopher Chantrill
CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago

An apposite essay, thank you.
Here in the UK Madison is chiefly remembered as the slaver who idiotically provoked the disastrous War of 1812. His performance during the war was abysmal, famously deciding to leg it’ after the Battle of Bladensburg, thus allowing the British Army to famously burn the White House and all other public buildings in DC to the ground.* In mitigation it must said that the rest of US Army did likewise, so much so that ‘we’ normally refer to it as the “Bladensburg Races”, rather than a proper battle.
Hamilton, happy enough to marry into an affluent (Dutch) major slave owning family is chiefly remembered for being a rotten shot. In his testosterone fuelled duel with Mr Burr he only managed to hit a tree, whilst the steadier Burr hit him in the liver. Of such stuff are our heroes made.

(* Anniversary, next week, the 24th August,)

Last edited 2 years ago by CHARLES STANHOPE
Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
2 years ago

I read ”Burr” back in the 70s when I was a curious kid. Vidal’s fiction was fun back then (“Myra Breckinridge”, anyone?), but drawing anything other than utter, poisonous disdain for the United States and its founders from this malicious man is akin to getting history from Hollywood. Why Douthat chose “Burr” for his Caesar analogy is odd, since Vidal wrote a much better book, about an actual Caesar, Julian, who tried to save Rome from the horrors of Christianity – an emperor of whom Vidal heartily approved.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago

Yes, the Apostate, a great loss indeed.

James 0
James 0
2 years ago

Vidal was a republican (small R) and often despaired of the imperial direction his country had taken. Yes, he grew more cantakerous with age, but that shouldn’t overshadow his work.

He actually had a lot of time for Lincoln, who in many ways was the ideal republican politician: willing to seize power and use it to protect the republic, but prepared to hand it back again.

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
2 years ago

I keep running into this idea that Trump was a “populist”. Why is that? He only won an electoral victory, didnt he? Is it because “populist” has become a polite form of plebian? Or hoipolloi? Obama was more popular. Why isn’t he a populist President?

Last edited 2 years ago by Jeff Cunningham
David Yetter
David Yetter
2 years ago

Populist is not the same as popular. Populist refers to a politician or movement which seeks power on the basis of a claim to represent the interests of the (virtuous) populace against a (corrupt) elite. Thus, both Trump and Bernie Sanders are characterized as populist. There are even suggestions that Boris Johnson was (is) a populist, a view shared by a lot of “Red Wall” voters who voted Tory for the first time in their lives in the last British general election, at least if the word is shorn of the negative connotation it usually has when uttered by supporters of the status quo..

Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
2 years ago

Gore Vidal left to live in Italy.
“Lincoln” is his Amerikan Caesar novel.
It is all so ‘katty’ behind the scenes in DC not intelligence.
The new ‘Gaslit’ film also reflects this

Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
2 years ago

Aaron Burr was a man of action.
The rest were men of Letters.

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago

Most Americans think that Caesar was the guy who invented a salad and a Vegas casino, like they cannot understand how the Brits built Windsor castle in the Heathrow flightpath…

Michael Daniele
Michael Daniele
2 years ago

We get it, you hate Americans. But your repeated arrogance and condescension grow tiresome.

Tanya Kratz
Tanya Kratz
2 years ago

Yes! I’ve noticed quite a bit of anti American sentiment here. What is at the root of that? Anyone care to hazard a guess?

Last edited 2 years ago by Tanya Kratz
CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago
Reply to  Tanya Kratz

You “rise too easily to the bait”, he’s only ‘winding you up’. I’m sure no malice is intended.

Tanya Kratz
Tanya Kratz
2 years ago

Charles, I had actually considered after posting my comment above that he was joking in that way the English do; they say something that sounds offensive and then you are supposed to hit the ball back with some witty reply. And yes there is no malice in this English way but for me I find it exhausting, TBH.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago
Reply to  Tanya Kratz

Yes it is a bit tedious, you have to have been trained from birth to understand it.
A riposte to N S-T might have been: “Perhaps, but had it not been for Lend-Lease you would all be speaking German”.

Terry M
Terry M
2 years ago

You already bow to a German queen.

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
2 years ago
Reply to  Tanya Kratz

It’s banter Tanya! Or bantz as the youngsters call it these days apparently.
At its most vicious when engaging with your best mates. Love it – I goad my Remainer friends every time I meet them, trying to get a decent debate going. Women often seem to think it’s needlessly antagonistic but I see they’re getting into it these days too.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
2 years ago

You’re certainly proud of your bigotry, so I guess that’s something.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago

If it hadn’t been Heathrow it would have been Heston of Chamberlain fame.

Michael Walsh
Michael Walsh
2 years ago

I gotta admit, the Windsor Castle thing still baffles me.