by Steve Farrell
I believe in absolutes, religious absolutes, moral absolutes, scientific absolutes (that is, useful bits and pieces of still hidden, more fundamental, scientific absolutes), political absolutes, and historical absolutes.
But I’ve also learned through 33 years of research that the more I know, the less I know. That is not to say that on certain fundamentals my convictions haven’t waxed firmer; it is to say that on many other matters, fine points, historical assumptions, assigning motives to individuals, I have found I was either partially or completely wrong, and I admit it. Hopefully with experience, and a few intellectual and moral bumps and bruises over time, a wee bit of humility is spawned in us all.
Continued self-education and a moral compass has done that for me — as well as listening intently to the discoveries of fellow researchers. One of them observed in regards to America’s Founding Fathers that we have assigned the appellation “key founding father” to men like Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and Hamilton because, in part, those five left behind a large written record for historians, political scientists and other to indulge their fondest dreams in.
Other founders, he noted, were just as “key” or “more so” but were not remembered as such because either they spoke more than they wrote, destroyed their writings (for the sake of humility or for the sake of others), or had their writings lost or destroyed through accident, fire, or neglect. And then again, other founders history ignored not because they failed to leave a substantial written record, and not because they weren’t key players, but because they were far more outspoken on their Christianity, and, well, today’s revisionists will have nothing to do with anything like that!
Then there is the matter of the famous five falling in and out of grace among the historians of a given era.
There is a cure for much of this today; it’s called the Internet. I spent quite a number of months one year reading all 19 volumes of Jefferson online (I have repeated this process with many of the other Founders). I no longer need to rely upon historians and political writers to tell me what this man said or wrote, I only need to point and click and the original source is before me. Yes, it has been with point and click access that I’ve come to learn what a few analysts suggested, that many of these so-called historians and political experts haven’t read the original, or if they have, they are hardened liars. But I’ve also learned that a few of the more patriotic analysts that I did trust, are also in la la land about what the Founders really said and really believed.
Original record on hand, the historian is still useful. If he’s done his homework, and many of them have, he helps provide the setting and context for the written word. He gives it life and wings. That said, he can also be a very dangerous fellow, depending on his motives, his intellectual limitations, his religious and moral framework (or lack thereof), and what he is willing to do to solicit a favorable review from the leftist press. Thus, the latest on Hamilton from what was otherwise a powerful biography, Hamilton may have been gay. Hogwash! The evidence he admitted wasn’t there, but he kept bringing it up, stretching the unlikely into the impossible.
Ah! but this was as good a history as those first and later accounts that truck a blow at Benjamin Franklin’s morality. Franklin we’ve all learned loved to frequent the French baths with many a naked Frenchwoman. But original sources tell us something quite different. In his eighties, after his wife’s death, and at a time when he suffered from stones and other painful maladies, he played chess with a married woman who he thought fondly upon as his daughter, and who in turn fondly called him Papa (Franklin, did, in time, feel a little bit of a romantic pull for her, several times joking in letters that she would become his plural wife after death). The chess match was played while she bathed under a wood enclosure that fully covered all but her head and arms. The chessboard was placed on top of the enclosure. I’m not sure who won the match, but Franklin lost to history and his enemies.
You see the ‘dirty’ little “rumor gathered as it rolled, and all who heard it added something new, and all who spake it made enlargement too, in every ear it spread, on every tongue it grew.”
Franklin’s political opponents had a field day with the tale, and revisionist historians of the 20th and 21st Century, whose motives are questionable (many of them seeming to be on a mission to discredit the American Founding in general), have with this distorted piece of evidence made of this great American statesmen, inventor, and diplomat, a philander.
Franklin’s advice to his son, after the fact, “avoid the very appearance of evil.”
And so I’ve learned: readers of history and believers in historical absolutes beware: beware the ill motives of tellers of tall tales and historical revisionists who hate God, family, and country, but love Marx and Lenin.
Steve Farrell is one of the original pundits at Silver Eddy Award Winner, NewsMax.com (1999–2008), associate professor of political economy at George Wythe University, the author of the highly praised inspirational novel “Dark Rose,” and editor in chief of The Moral Liberal.
