Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) (2 page)

A long list of individuals generously contributed in various ways, providing important feedback, reading drafts, and writing letters for grant applications. I especially thank Lauren Berlant, Frances Clarke, John D'Emilio,
Toby Ditz, Carolyn Eastman, Estelle Freedman, Francois Furstenberg, Lori
Glover, Annette Gordon-Reed, Nancy Isenberg, James E.McWilliams,
Robin Mitchell, Rebecca Plant, Elizabeth Reis, Lisa Sigel, Roshanna Sylvester, David Waldstreicher, and-for making a trip to Mt. Vernon so enjoyable-Wayne Wheeler. I am also grateful to Jordan Stein, who provided
timely, insightful, and encouraging words at a very critical point.

I thank Dr. Gerard Gawalt, in the Manuscript Division of the Library
of Congress, who granted me access to Gouverneur Morris's original diaries.
Numerous other individuals helped me understand Morris's world, including Dena Goodman, Catherine Kudlick, Jeffery Merrick, Melanie Miller,
and Ben Mutschler.

I am grateful to Marello Harris for his initial research at the University
of Georgia; to Ramiro Hernandez and Katarzyna Szymanska for their help
with various projects; and to DePaul University's College of Liberal Arts and
Social Sciences Undergraduate Research Assistant program for supporting
the labor of Sandra Sasal, Zachary Stafford, and Katie Suleta. DePaul University has provided me with not only a reliable livelihood but also supportive colleagues and engaging students. I received additional financial support
from DePaul in the form of a DePaul Summer Research Grant, a fellowship
at the DePaul Humanities Center, a Competitive Research Grant, and travel
funding.

As the book took shape, it benefited from the feedback and support of a
small army of editors, peer reviewers, and even potential agents-but especially Debbie Gershenowitz, Gayatri Patnaik, and Janet Francedese and the
team at Temple University Press.

Over the years, I honed my arguments and gained new understanding
from the responses of audiences at the Gerber-Hart Library, the University
of Northern Iowa, Purdue University at Calumet, and the University of
Mary Washington. I was also fortunate to have the opportunity to discuss
the work at a number of conferences, including the American Men's Studies
Association Annual Conference, Creating the Past: Early American Museums between History and Edu-entertainment, the European Early American
Studies Association Biennial Conference, the Newberry Seminar on Women
and Gender, Queering Paradigms IV, and (Re)Figuring Sex: Somatechnical
(Re)Visions.

Finally, I express my gratitude to New York University Press, Disability
Studies Quarterly, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the corresponding anonymous peer reviewers, who provided useful feedback on portions of
this project that I developed into essays published in these academic journals
and in an edited volume published by New York University Press.

Sex and the American Quest
for a Relatable Past

IVING AS WE DO in an era in which public figures are subjected to
extreme scrutiny in the form of media intrusions, we tend to think
of our interest in reconciling public images with private sexual conduct as uniquely postmodern. In fact, Americans have long invested national
heroes with superior moral status and at the same time probed into their
private lives. If the Founding Fathers seem remote to us now, that distance
persists despite the efforts of generations of biographers who attempt to take
their measure as leaders and tell us what they were really like in their most
intimate relationships. From the early years of the Republic till now, biographers have attempted to burnish the Founders' images and satisfy public
curiosity about their lives beyond public view. At the same time, gossips and
politically motivated detractors, claiming to have the inside track on new
information, have circulated scandalous or unpleasant stories to knock these
exalted men off their pedestals. Looking back at the stories and assessments
that have proliferated in the two and a half centuries since the Founders'
generation, we see the dual nature of these accounts and how they oscillate
between the public and the private, between the idealized image and actions
in the intimate realm. We see how each generation reshapes images of the
Founders to fit that storyteller's era.

On the one hand, the Founders appear desexualized. The images of the
Founding Fathers that we regularly encounter-as heads on money, as reference points in discussions about political ideology, and as monuments at tourist sites-assert their status as virtuous American men. They typically
appear either disembodied-as heads or busts-or in clothing that reminds
us of their political or military position. Their flesh is covered from neck to
wrists, with only hands and face exposed. Typically, the men are frozen in
advanced age-generally gray-haired, if not topped off with wigs-further
confirming their identities as desexualized elder statesman for generations of
Americans who associate sexual activity with youth.'

On the other side of the coin, curiosity about their "real" lives has continued seemingly unabated into our own time. In 1810, Mason L. (Parson)
Weems, originator of the cherry-tree myth, emphasized the importance of
discussing George Washington's personal life. Weems argues that "public
character" is no "evidence of true greatness" and calls for a spotlight to be
shined on his "private life." Weems gives the compelling example of Benedict Arnold, who could "play you the great man" "yet in the private walks
of life" reveal himself to be a "swindler"-including not only his political
deception but his use of the "aid of loose women." For Weems, the Founders'
intimate relationships should not be off-limits for Americans: "It is not, then,
in the glare of public, but in the shade of private life, that we are to look for
the man. Private life is always real life." To truly know them, their conduct
in that realm is an important piece of the puzzle.'

By tracing how intimacy has figured in popular memory of the Founders from their own lifetimes to the recent past, Sex and the Founding Fathers
shows that sex has long been used to define their masculine character and
political authority and has always figured in civic and national identity.'
Each generation has asked different questions about the Founders and their
private lives, but Americans have consistently imagined and reimagined the
private lives of the Founders through the lens of contemporary society. As
Michael Kammen and others have argued, countries "reconstruct their pasts
rather than faithfully record them" and "do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind."4 Gore Vidal has referred to our selective
national memory as "The United States of Amnesia."5 It is true that we tend
to embrace the national narratives that we desire and "forget" those that we
prefer to hide away. Stories about the Founders' lives have always been told
in ways that make use of the norms and ideals of the time period. Founders
can never be embraced in their late-eighteenth-century context, for, as the
saying goes, the past is a foreign country-and the Founders lose their cultural utility when viewed as foreigners. Americans want to see themselves in
their images, because these men, the men who created America, are by their
actions the embodiment of the nation and of our national identity.

Scholars have shown how the Founding Fathers have been central to our
sense of national identity. The Founders created the nation and can never be
divorced from our understanding of it. They embody the nation, its principles, and even its founding documents. In this sense, they are unchanging and can always serve to connect Americans with American identity.'
Today, the Founders generate both vast book sales and daily reference by
politicians, jurists interpreting the Constitution, schoolteachers, and ordinary citizens-each of whom holds up the Founders' historical significance
because of their roles in establishing the political structure of the nation and
in shaping our national identity? By examining how their most intimate
thoughts and actions figure in popular imagining of the Founders, we are
able to deepen our understanding of how sexuality and gender are important
components of civic and national identity.

Today, Americans still trade in stories about the sexual escapades of the
Founding Fathers. The topic is often used to draw a contrast between distinct private and public worlds.' Consider the following examples. A farcical article, written in the straight-faced style of The Onion, reports on the
recent discovery of raunchy letters written by Washington to a woman he
desired; 9 the article is accompanied by a lurid portrait of Washington with
a grotesquely large bulge in his pants. A popular author visits The Daily
Show with Jon Stewart to promote his recent book on Thomas Jefferson:
"It's a book about our founding fathers as if they had penises," he tells the
audience. "Most founding-father books omit the cock. I put it in."10 Such
self-consciously irreverent cultural expressions draw on the assumption that
the authors are making a compelling contrast by placing that which is sexless
(historic, public, proper) alongside open sexuality (modern, private, crude).
They rely on a particular notion of the Founders as popularly repressed and
mock our culture for denying them, and all Americans, their sexuality.

Some authors have focused entire studies on the intimate lives of the
Founders." Journalist Thomas Fleming has published a collection of biographies on the "intimate lives" of the Founding Fathers as a way to personalize them for a modern audience." But he is certainly not the first to do so.
Historian Charles Tansill published his book on the romantic lives of the
Founders in 1964, basing it upon lectures he gave to his students as a way to
"humanize" the political leaders of the American Revolution. Others have
included chapters on the Founders in their books on the "sex lives" of the
American presidents.13 Hustler publisher Larry Flynt has teamed up with historian David Eisenbach to write a book that argues that the presidents' sex
lives have, in fact, shaped the development of the nation. Management con sultant Wesley 0. Hagood has written a book on the sex lives of presidents
in part to contextualize President Bill Clinton's impeachment trial. Michael
Farquhar has similarly written his best-selling collection of "American scandals" in part so that "the first three centuries of American scandal" could
"put a little perspective on the relatively minor sins of recent memory.""

Many Americans are already familiar with anecdotes about the Revolutionary War era's leaders' sex lives precisely because they are the topic of
a long-running discussion. To provide two immediate examples, Jefferson's
long affair with Sally Herrings and Benjamin Franklin's "flirtation" with
Parisian ladies during his tenure as diplomat continue to fascinate. At the
time of the nation's founding, political enemies used such information to
smear the Founders' characters. In cultural memory, many Americans use
such stories to emphasize the flaws, foibles, or vanities that make the Founders more fully three-dimensional and relatable.