In the lead-up to this spring’s release of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s book “The Courage to Be Free,” a funny thing happened on the internet: His first book, published in 2011 before his political career began, disappeared.
“Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama,” was once available at the click of a button as an e-book, but no more. A used hard copy is selling for almost $1,950 at the only online bookseller that appears to have it. The publisher, a small vanity label in Florida called High-Pitched Hum Publishing, did not respond to phone calls or social media messages about why the e-book was removed.
Fortunately, The Washington Post purchased a digital copy last summer, in anticipation that it may someday become more relevant. Now, with DeSantis (R) expected to officially declare his bid for the presidency this week, that time has come.
ADVERTISING
“Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” in title, cover and content, is essentially a troll of former president Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” which recounted Obama’s upbringing and young adulthood before he entered Harvard Law School.
In his book, DeSantis, who has moved to stop history lessons in Florida that might make students uncomfortable and who attacked an AP African American Studies course he said “lacks educational value,” dismisses slavery as a “personal flaw” of the Founding Fathers, irrelevant to the really important stuff: context-free, cherry-picked quotes from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.
(Crown Publishing)
His writing is coherent, pretty lively and includes — angels and harps! — footnotes to his sourcing. This alone makes it better than the vast majority of politicians’ attempts at writing history. And though DeSantis aligned himself with the tea party movement when he wrote the book, he does not subscribe to its conspiracy theories claiming Obama was a secret Muslim or born in Kenya. He also does not think “death panels” are real — though “concerns about them are not foolhardy,” he writes.
But DeSantis’s thesis is twofold: that Obama was conducting a dangerous power grab, and that the Founding Fathers would have been appalled if they were still alive to see it.
The largely forgotten book ban case that went up to the Supreme Court
According to DeSantis, evidence of Obama’s power grab includes the auto industry bailout, the 2009 stimulus package and Obamacare. The president’s anti-American principles, DeSantis alleges, come from the usual boogeymen — activist-writer Saul Alinsky, formerly incarcerated professor Bill Ayers, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — plus poet Frank Marshall Davis and the father who abandoned Obama when he was 2. DeSantis then writes a laundry list of bad things these men once said and pins them onto Obama.
If that seems like a bit of a stretch, the balance of the book is devoted to performing a similar maneuver on the Founding Fathers, glomming DeSantis’s loathing for the 44th president onto quotes from Madison and Hamilton. Other Founders are mentioned only in passing and only so far as they can be made to support DeSantis’s argument, with one exception: a late chapter about George Washington.
“Slavery,” he writes, “had been a fact of life throughout human history.” It’s a variation on the false argument that “people didn’t know it was wrong back then.” In any case, the form of slavery practiced in the early republic — lifelong, inherited, race-based, chattel slavery — was particularly severe and relatively new, as far as human history goes.
Did Ben Franklin really say, ‘A republic, if you can keep it’?
Some of the Founding Fathers, such as Gouverneur Morris and Benjamin Franklin, opposed slavery anyway, DeSantis writes. True enough, though he hardly mentions either man again until the conclusion of the book, when he repeats that some of the Founding Fathers opposed slavery. It’s as if Morris and Franklin have nothing to offer DeSantis by way of writing, philosophy or the “First Principles” of his book’s title (read: limited government) and are simply useful as permission slips to skip the yucky parts.
DeSantis concludes his brief discussion of slavery with: “Though it was not immediately abolished, slavery was doomed to fail in a nation whose Constitution embodied such philosophical truths” as liberty. Many of the Founders believed in the inevitability of slavery’s gradual end, but anyone today capable of typing “cotton gin” should know that isn’t what happened. By the time of the Civil War, fully eight decades after the revolution, American slavery was bigger, crueller, more entrenched and more profitable than ever.
“Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama,” was once available at the click of a button as an e-book, but no more. A used hard copy is selling for almost $1,950 at the only online bookseller that appears to have it. The publisher, a small vanity label in Florida called High-Pitched Hum Publishing, did not respond to phone calls or social media messages about why the e-book was removed.
Fortunately, The Washington Post purchased a digital copy last summer, in anticipation that it may someday become more relevant. Now, with DeSantis (R) expected to officially declare his bid for the presidency this week, that time has come.
ADVERTISING
“Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” in title, cover and content, is essentially a troll of former president Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” which recounted Obama’s upbringing and young adulthood before he entered Harvard Law School.
In his book, DeSantis, who has moved to stop history lessons in Florida that might make students uncomfortable and who attacked an AP African American Studies course he said “lacks educational value,” dismisses slavery as a “personal flaw” of the Founding Fathers, irrelevant to the really important stuff: context-free, cherry-picked quotes from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.
(Crown Publishing)
His writing is coherent, pretty lively and includes — angels and harps! — footnotes to his sourcing. This alone makes it better than the vast majority of politicians’ attempts at writing history. And though DeSantis aligned himself with the tea party movement when he wrote the book, he does not subscribe to its conspiracy theories claiming Obama was a secret Muslim or born in Kenya. He also does not think “death panels” are real — though “concerns about them are not foolhardy,” he writes.
But DeSantis’s thesis is twofold: that Obama was conducting a dangerous power grab, and that the Founding Fathers would have been appalled if they were still alive to see it.
The largely forgotten book ban case that went up to the Supreme Court
According to DeSantis, evidence of Obama’s power grab includes the auto industry bailout, the 2009 stimulus package and Obamacare. The president’s anti-American principles, DeSantis alleges, come from the usual boogeymen — activist-writer Saul Alinsky, formerly incarcerated professor Bill Ayers, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — plus poet Frank Marshall Davis and the father who abandoned Obama when he was 2. DeSantis then writes a laundry list of bad things these men once said and pins them onto Obama.
If that seems like a bit of a stretch, the balance of the book is devoted to performing a similar maneuver on the Founding Fathers, glomming DeSantis’s loathing for the 44th president onto quotes from Madison and Hamilton. Other Founders are mentioned only in passing and only so far as they can be made to support DeSantis’s argument, with one exception: a late chapter about George Washington.
Slavery ‘a fact of life’
Any history book about the Founders must acknowledge that many of them were enslavers, and DeSantis gets to it in the introduction with a whiff.“Slavery,” he writes, “had been a fact of life throughout human history.” It’s a variation on the false argument that “people didn’t know it was wrong back then.” In any case, the form of slavery practiced in the early republic — lifelong, inherited, race-based, chattel slavery — was particularly severe and relatively new, as far as human history goes.
Did Ben Franklin really say, ‘A republic, if you can keep it’?
Some of the Founding Fathers, such as Gouverneur Morris and Benjamin Franklin, opposed slavery anyway, DeSantis writes. True enough, though he hardly mentions either man again until the conclusion of the book, when he repeats that some of the Founding Fathers opposed slavery. It’s as if Morris and Franklin have nothing to offer DeSantis by way of writing, philosophy or the “First Principles” of his book’s title (read: limited government) and are simply useful as permission slips to skip the yucky parts.
DeSantis concludes his brief discussion of slavery with: “Though it was not immediately abolished, slavery was doomed to fail in a nation whose Constitution embodied such philosophical truths” as liberty. Many of the Founders believed in the inevitability of slavery’s gradual end, but anyone today capable of typing “cotton gin” should know that isn’t what happened. By the time of the Civil War, fully eight decades after the revolution, American slavery was bigger, crueller, more entrenched and more profitable than ever.
