Don't Tread On Me. - Review - book reviews

A Necessary Evil; A History of American Distrust of Government By Garry Wills Simon and Schuster, $24.50, 343 pp.

Does Garry Wills write faster than I read? The arrival of Wills's latest book, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, prompts this disturbing thought. As I write this review Wills's biography of Saint Augustine, published to critical acclaim six months ago, lies half read on my nightstand. The September issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains an incisive essay on Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address that develops topics first elaborated in Wills's Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg. I only skimmed the book on John Wayne. In the last two years Wills has published substantial essays on, among other topics, Italian silent film, Greek sculpture, Jesse Ventura, the Sundance film festival, President Bill Clinton, and the Iliad. In the last forty years I count twenty-one books. And not even Wills, I'm guessing, bothers to count the reviews, newspaper columns, and articles.

The term "public intellectual" is a weary one, and too often it means the print equivalent of Larry King. Or a deadly reiteration, recycled in various media, of one long-held, slightly suspect idea. But Wills remains the real, sometimes the only, thing. At his best he delves into the literature on his chosen subject, avoiding the disdain for scholarly argument that among some commentators masks an unwillingness to complicate convenient assertions. He then emerges with a provocative interpretation of (take your pick) religion and American politics, the Declaration of Independence, American Catholicism, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, that challenges specialists even as the clarity of his prose attracts the elusive general reader.

A Necessary Evil rests firmly in this canon, although not at the top rank. The book originated as Wills observed the Republican success during the 1994 congressional elections and the subsequent antigovernmental rhetoric that accompanied the standoff between the House of Representatives and President Clinton. And too, Wills noted the ways in which figures as disparate as David Koresh and Oliver Stone warned of an overreaching state.

The basic argument is unexceptionable: that Americans piled a suspicion of the Constitution, a frontier tradition, and a cult of the gun onto "the general anti-authoritarian instincts of mankind." Our history, and false readings of that history, make Americans susceptible to a naive faith in the local group. We contrast the supposed effectiveness of guerrilla warfare in revolutionary South Carolina and Vietnam with lumbering armies. We ponder term limits for public officials as a mechanism for returning government to "the people."

Wills upends several antigovernmental shibboleths. The founders did not believe in state sovereignty; the three branches of government exist not to check federal power but to make its exercise more efficient. Secessionists received a "definitive refutation" of their constitutional claims from Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Webster, and Andrew Jackson.

He is especially concerned that a broad interpretation of the right to bear arms not receive further sanction. National Rifle Association publicists like to compare their efforts to those of the Lexington minutemen, but colonial militias, in fact, did little to aid the revolutionary war effort. One historian calls them "more noisy than useful." Most families did not even own a gun. As Wills puts it, "Then there was one gun for every ten people in the colonies. Now there are more than one for every man, woman, and child in America....Yet this latter situation is justified by appeal to the former."

The academic supporters of this broad antigovernmental impulse come in for careful scrutiny. It is, after all, startling to find prominent legal scholars discovering a right to armed resistance of the government, a right emanating from a putatively antigovernment climate in 1787. And Wills demolishes arguments against the constitutionality of standing armies or even the army's ability to choose its own soldiers.

Where Wills is less persuasive, for all his historical acumen, is in his analysis of the origin of our current dilemma. The logic of A Necessary Evil presupposes an antigovernment sentiment stretching from Patrick Henry to Idaho survivalists. But the vitriol directed at the federal government by federal employees like Congressman Tom DeLay (R- Tex.), and the violence orchestrated by a Timothy McVeigh, are genuinely new in the context of twentieth-century American life. Imagine Sam Rayburn treating the House of Representatives with the same contempt evidenced by recent waves of congressional reformers, many so suspicious of "the Beltway" that they cannot bear to spend weekends in the corrupting capital.

Instead, this mistrust stems from the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when governmental authority came under unprecedented attack. Governmental officials had, after all, spied on their own citizens, and conducted an immoral and often illegal war. Conservatives typically supported the American effort in Vietnam, but attacked government with the same vehemence a decade later. Ronald Reagan's view of government was the bloated nanny state, protector of prying bureaucrats and welfare cheats. And Jack Kemp (who termed the bombing of Kosovo an "international Waco") and other conservatives now attack Clinton with the same bloodlust that student activists once reserved for Richard Nixon.

A generation after John Kennedy's call to government service, talented college graduates choosing federal employment over a career in, say, investment banking have become scarce. Attendance at political rallies, membership in political parties, and voting rates have declined. Violent resistance to the government began on the left side of the political spectrum, but the same admiration for guerrilla tactics and the local group marks both the Weatherman and the Michigan Militia.

Perhaps the broader problem is a contemporary suspicion of institutions, not just long-standing antagonism toward government. The list Wills compiles of antigovernmental attitudes- a preference for the "authentic," the "spontaneous," the "candid," and the "participatory"- could double as a dictionary for sixties-era reformers cynical about political parties, trade unions, and the nuclear family. Wills describes government as a "necessary good" and complains that "when marriages fail, we do not think it is because marriage is an evil in itself." But marriage, too, is a more fragile institution in 1999 than 1969, by causes good and bad. Wills's goal in A Necessary Evil is admirable-to stop Americans from loving their country by hating their government. But its achievement may depend upon social changes more far-reaching than a proper interpretation of the Second Amendment.

John McGreevy, the author of Parish Boundaries (Chicago), teaches history at the University of Notre Dame.

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