Among the most remarkable facts about the Founding Fathers, though little discussed, is how much John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the others read. They belonged to what I call “the culture of reading,” men of books.
What did they read? The Bible, of course; Roman writers like Cicero and Livy; Greek philosopher Plutarch; Italian Renaissance poets; and then there were the writers of the Enlightenment, the writers of common knowledge. If we talk about which Enlightenment writers the Founders read, the names of John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Hume, to name a few, recur. How many of us, however, know that John Adams’s favorite story was the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast”? Or that Jefferson read and reread Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” throughout his life, while George Washington was fond of Smollett’s “Humphry Clinker”?
Some of the Founders began libraries, others schools. Early public education started with one goal: to teach the citizenry to read, particularly the Bible. However, reading as an educational goal is, alas, no longer in favor—and to our detriment. Our country was founded on the love of reading and the belief in its necessity for our fragile Republic. When I think of Ben Franklin’s words—“a Republic, if you can keep it”—I think of the need for literate citizens.
Our Republic suffers today because we do not consider reading books an essential ingredient in education. I would argue that the only requirement to become educated is that of reading, which does not necessitate that young people attend an expensive college or university or go deeply into debt. Buying books is a bargain in comparison.
When I was in high school, I had lists of the ten or twenty or more books that every entering college student should read or have read. Loving lists, and loving to read, I worked my way through several titles. Some writers, like Joseph Conrad, whom I read when I was fourteen, were far too old for me. Others, like Jane Austen, I read with delighted relish—her humor always infectious. The point, however, is that I entered college already familiar with the books professors were assigning. In class after class, I was revisiting old friends or re-encountering those with whom I had never been able to become comfortable with a few years earlier.
Let me repeat. Our Republic is suffering because we have forgotten that we must read. In our lack of reading, we find ourselves at the mercy of those who claim to have done the reading, the research, and know the facts on any given cultural or political issue. How often do they? Not often. If these gatekeepers do not like the facts or the story, they change it, rewrite it, or reshape it. Those keepers at the gate do not expect their audience to know or to bother finding out what they have done. They believe we do not know how to read for ourselves—or that we will just not bother.
So, a story about a speech? Or a tweet? How many of us read the original to discover the true story—and not the often outrageous fabrication produced by the gatekeepers? Our failure puts ourselves and, thus, our Republic in jeopardy.
These ruminations make me think of Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer whose writing helped bring about the American Revolution. He wrote for the ordinary, everyday inhabitant of this soon-to-be fledgling country. He stirred people with phrases like “These are the times that try men’s souls,” a more euphonious sentence—rarely written and so movingly memorable. People, our forebears, read Paine, enough so that we defeated the British and won our freedom.
We have had other great readers in our history. Abraham Lincoln is an obvious and well-known example. It is sad, though, that we can name so few such leaders. However, just because we are only able to name a few, we, the citizenry, do not have the excuse to disregard reading, ourselves. The less trustworthy our cultural and political “leaders” are, the more incumbent upon us it is to read—and to read widely, routinely, and regularly. We can start our own lists of must-read books. We can share them, talk about them, and encourage each other to read the books on our lists.
Ben Franklin used the conditional in talking about our Republic, which was born in a flood of reading, but Franklin’s big “if” still exists today. We need a new flood of reading, for I know of no better way to answer Franklin than to open a book and begin to read.
Cheryl Forbes is Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She is the author of eight books on theology, philosophy, science, and memoir.
The opinions expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.