"Today, the series of newspaper articles that ran from October 1787 through August 1788 is known as the “Federalist Papers,” and, let’s be honest, the mere mention of them usually results in most people yawning. They’re written in terribly hard-to-read eighteenth-century English, they reference things that most of us have never heard about, and, let’s just say it: They seem irrelevant."
—Glenn Beck, The Original Argument
—Glenn Beck, The Original Argument
"Even today, some people would prefer that you not read the Federalist Papers. Instead they would rather contort Publius’s words to serve their own narrow ideological ends. Some people have tried to rewrite history and the intent behind the Federalist Papers to create a false portrait of our Founding Fathers . . . . Those who are honest in their love for America should have no issue with anyone reading our founding documents and drawing their own conclusions. It’s people who want to speak in place of those documents that we should be wary of."
—Glenn Beck, a few pages later
—Glenn Beck, a few pages later
The English of the Federalist Papers is perfectly readable the way that it is. This is not to say that the Federalist Papers are easy to understand. They are notoriously difficult, as Beck acknowledges. But it is their arguments, not their language, that make them difficult. The authors were well educated political theorists who expected their readers to understand difficult concepts and abstract ideas. The difficulty of the prose flows from the difficulty of the ideas, not their antiquity; difficult concepts often require difficult language. That’s how hard stuff works.
Beck, I should point out, did not create the “translation” itself. For this, he relies on the efforts of his collaborator, Joshua Charles, a piano performance major at the University of Kansas who (he informs us in the introduction) completed the translation project during his senior year of college and managed to get them into the hands of Beck, whom he considered a political idol. Charles tells us that he undertook the “translation” because, when he read the original work, he felt “frustration trying to grasp what Publius was saying.” (I would simply point out here that most really good translators have sufficient familiarity with the origin language to understand what the author is trying to say already. We trust translators because they have an expertise that we don't, not because they share our linguistic frustration.)
But, to be fair, both Josh Charles and Glenn Beck acknowledge that they are not scholars of 18th century literature. Their project is motivated by love (they suggest), not scholarly expertise. For better or worse, however, I do happen to be a scholar of 18th century literature, and, in that capacity, I spent this evening comparing the “translation” with the original. Beck claims in his portion of the introduction that “great care was taken in the translation process to update Publius’s words in the most accurate, nonideological way possible.”
This is simply not true. While great care may well have been taken, the result is 1) as ideologically narrow as one would expect from Beck; and 2) wildly inaccurate in its choice of modern words for eighteenth-century concepts. In almost every case that I have been able to identify in which an eighteenth-century definition of a word has changed substantially over the past 200 years, the “translation” uses the modern (inaccurate) cognate rather than a modern word or phrase that captures the original meaning. As a translation, it is simply inept.
Let me give just one example, which comes from the updated version of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist # 1 and contains egregious errors in both ideology and language. Beck begins this essay (as he does all of the Federalist Papers that he reprints) with a summary “main point” that readers are to get from the original work and a “relevance to today” section that explains how this main point applies to America in 2011. In this case, the main point and contemporary relevance go like this:
The Message: America is special because our rights come from God, but those rights must be protected by a central government that serves the people.
Relevance to Today: The Founders believed America to be exception [sic.], but some students are now being taught “multiculturalism,” the idea that no culture or country is superior to or better than another.
According to Beck and Charles, then, Federalist #1 is about American exceptionalism—the fact that America was chosen by God to be something different, and better, than other nations (the required contrapositive to "the message" is that other countries are not special because their rights don't come from God). This is a core component of Beck’s own political philosophy. And whether or not it was a core belief of the Founders is certainly a debate worth having. We can say with some certainty, however, that there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in Federalist #1 that argues for, supports, or even hints at American exceptionalism—and especially not divine favor—as Beck understands it. Don’t take my word for it please. Read it here or here or one of the thousand or so other sites on the web that archive the original document.
The quote in the original text that Beck cites for this interpretation is from the first paragraph:
The quote in the original text that Beck cites for this interpretation is from the first paragraph:
The subject [the importance of the debate over the Constitution] speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world.
So, how do we get from the statement that the current debate about the constitution is important to America and to the rest of the world (because a lot of other countries are watching America to see what happens) to “America is special because our rights come from God”? I admit that I can’t quite trace the logical leap here (since this is all that Beck quotes from the original text), but I suspect it has something to do with the way that Mr. Charles translates the first paragraph of Federalist #1:
The importance of this discussion is clear—nothing less than the Union itself, the safety and welfare of all of the states, and the fate of a nation, one which is in many ways the most interesting in the world, is at stake.
The clear mistranslation here is the word “interesting.” To the modern reader, something is interesting if it has an inherent interest-producing property, such as a three-headed raccoon or a ten-thousand-year-old bar of soap. But this is a relatively recent connotation of the word. In the eighteenth century, "interest" meant something more like "stake in"--the way that we might use the word when talking of an investment property. Thus, the correct “translation” (if one were really serious about updating the eighteenth-century language) would be something like “. . . the fate of a nation—an outcome that, in many ways, other nations feel that they have more of a stake in then they do in the fate of any other nation in the world.”
To point out what Hamilton made abundantly clear in the latter part of the first paragraph: America is not "the most interesting country in the world" because it is exceptional. Rather, he believed that the fate of the 13 colonies (which were not yet "America" or any other country) was something that other countries had an "interest" in (felt a stake in) precisely because this fate was NOT "an exception," but a rule--an experiment whose results could be repeated because it was based on universal, and not exceptional, principles of human nature.
To point out what Hamilton made abundantly clear in the latter part of the first paragraph: America is not "the most interesting country in the world" because it is exceptional. Rather, he believed that the fate of the 13 colonies (which were not yet "America" or any other country) was something that other countries had an "interest" in (felt a stake in) precisely because this fate was NOT "an exception," but a rule--an experiment whose results could be repeated because it was based on universal, and not exceptional, principles of human nature.
So, though I do not quite understand how Beck gets “America is special because our rights come from God” out of his own translation, I think we can say, without any qualification, that there would be no way to pull such a statement out of the actual text. It just isn't there. (Did I mention you could read the original online in places like this). The original must be simplified for the ideology to slip through the Founder’s actual thoughts.
These sorts of mistakes pervade the Beck/Charles version of the Federalist Papers. They are the very predictable result of not being up to the intellectual demands of translation. Clearly, Charles, Beck, or somebody on Beck's staff looked up all of the hard words in The Federalist Papers and provided a gloss. That's the easy part. It is the words like "interesting"--words that seem easy but whose meanings have shifted over time--that plague this project from beginning to end. Understanding these words requires more than three years of piano performance at the University of Kansas. It requires substantial experience with primary documents: letters, journals, works by the same author and others of the same time. It requires (dare I even say such a thing) scholarship.
But even if Beck had employed every pianist in Kansas and really did make the text of The Original Argument accurate and ideologically neutral, it would still not be a "translation," which the Federalist Papers do not require, but a simplification. And herein lies the problem. Simplifying “the original argument” is an inherently ideological task. The proposition itself says to people, “the words of your Founding Fathers are important, but they are too hard for you to understand. You mustn’t try to read them yourself; you would just hurt your head. Let us make them easy for you.” I do not consider myself a conservative, but if I did, I would consider such a notion something akin to treason--a betrayal of the very principles for which "originalism" is supposed to stand. As a left-leaning centrist with a healthy respect for the Founders, I simply consider it a really bad idea.
Part II of this post is here: What Federalist #1 Actually Means (and Why Glenn Beck Had to Change It)
But even if Beck had employed every pianist in Kansas and really did make the text of The Original Argument accurate and ideologically neutral, it would still not be a "translation," which the Federalist Papers do not require, but a simplification. And herein lies the problem. Simplifying “the original argument” is an inherently ideological task. The proposition itself says to people, “the words of your Founding Fathers are important, but they are too hard for you to understand. You mustn’t try to read them yourself; you would just hurt your head. Let us make them easy for you.” I do not consider myself a conservative, but if I did, I would consider such a notion something akin to treason--a betrayal of the very principles for which "originalism" is supposed to stand. As a left-leaning centrist with a healthy respect for the Founders, I simply consider it a really bad idea.
Part II of this post is here: What Federalist #1 Actually Means (and Why Glenn Beck Had to Change It)
