It Ended in a Parking Lot
I've encountered a string of odd coincidences recently, and here's one: Last week I decided that I (one of many Americans facing the upcoming 250th birthday of our nation with an amalgamated sense of weary irony and sad trepidation) would benefit from reminding myself of the founding's true meaning. So I picked up a copy of The Radicalism of the American Revolution, a book I've long wanted to read. And of course, I had not so much as finished the preface when word broke that the author, historian Gordon Wood, had died at the age of 92.
My inbox and rss feeds have been filled with tributes to the man and his work. He seems the rare sort of person admired across the political spectrum, although I haven't looked at either Twitter or Bluesky, so who knows what the unhinged discourse has to say. What strikes me about all of these memorials is how the manner of the actual death is served up as a sort of postscript: the poor old man was mowed down in a parking lot.
Now, it is likely that many of the tributes were already in the can, so to speak. He was 92 years old, had a lot of admirers, and such copy was bound to be at the ready. But imagine for a moment a Pulitzer-winning historian had been killed in the parking lot of a shopping center … by a stray bullet. Such howls of outrage and grief, not at his death, but the tragic way in which it would have happened. Die by bullet, and your memory will be subsumed forever into the abstract policy debate. Die by car, and … well, we need cars, right?
It would be very easy for me to compare car-related deaths with gun-related deaths and make some half-assed claim about, "Hey, cars kill 40,000 people every year, and guns only 15,000 – well, that's if you take out the 30k or so suicides, and uh – well, yeah, anyway, how come you're not trying to ban cars then, huh?" But I'm not going into all that, because obviously, if we were all firing guns for an hour every day while scrolling through stupid shit on our phones, there would be a lot more gun-related deaths. 1
No, what makes me particularly sad about the way in which Wood was killed is the symbolism of it all. He died less than a month before the 250th birthday of the country whose origins he had dedicated his life to studying, exploring, explaining. A birthday which is now being celebrated, not with anything like the Bicentennial commemorative coins I remember so vaguely from my earliest years, or the parades, the TV miniseries, the sense that "Hey, gas prices are high, but here's something worth celebrating." Instead, we get, "Hey, gas prices are high, and there's ultimate fighting on the White House lawn." (Maybe there are coins? I don't know, not really the point.)
In his brief introduction to The Radicalism of the American Revolution (remember, that's as far as I've gotten so far), Wood speaks of the "puny" origins of our nation – a scant two million people clustered along the continent's coast, whose revolution came about not because the colonies were poor or oppressed; they were neither. The revolution happened because of ideas and theories, which sometimes did not produce results as the founders intended. The Revolution, Wood wrote over 35 years ago, "made the interests and prosperity of ordinary people – their pursuits of happiness – the goal of society and government."2
Well.
Do we see, at the time of this particularly tragic ending, the tentacles of our radical revolution, fingering out toward year 250? There is nothing in the Constitution, after all, to prevent our current state of affairs, whatever your opinion of them might be, and whatever you think I mean by "state of affairs." But that doesn't mean the Constitution caused them. If the revolution was one of ideas, one of ideals and theories, then perhaps we have forgotten the thing about ideals, which is that they are held by people, not by documents. And when people lose those ideals, when ideas are forgotten like dead historians …
Like their areas of study, historians get old; they pass, like, well, academic trends in their area of study. It is unusual for them to reach their latter-most years and get struck down by automobiles (which, unlike corruption and foreign entanglements, were not imagined by the founders). Alas, that's what happened to Wood. And I can't help but think: They pave paradise. They put up a parking lot. And they plow down those who remember why.
My focus can handle only so much, and I have two reading projects going on right now, but I'm going to try and read the rest of Wood's book between now and July 4, anyway. Join me, if you can. Perhaps, like me, you need a good reminder of the why.
Join the Conversation
💬 Comments are moderated and will appear after approval.