This July started out with a bang…and I am not just talking about July 4th.
As we recover from our Independence Day celebrations and look toward 2026 (the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence), I think it is a great time to shine the spotlight on a wonderful new book by investigative journalist and columnist Daniel Greenfield.
Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left, is a superb review of the early days of this nation to the Civil War in terms of the continuing continuing struggle to maintain personal liberty against utopian visionaries and their power-mongering tendencies.
Greenfield’s Domestic Enemies is an engaging and engrossing read. Using well-researched and entertainingly described accounts, he clearly shows the Founding Fathers fought battles very similar to those that we are dealing with today. Greenfield manages to capture the essence of the past, and manages to make it alive in a way the sadly reminds us these struggles are not new.
There are many historical figures and events that Greenfield hits between the American Revolution and the Civil War, but perhaps the most interesting is the information he covers about Aaron Burr, as the third vice president of the United States. Burr is perhaps best known for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel.
Domestic Enemies offers more insights into Burr’s involvements. Burr was involved with Manhattan Water Company, an exceedingly corrupt utility chartered by the state of New York to supply potable water to the people living at the southern tip of the island and which was funded by property taxes. Instead of offering drinkable water, the utility used the same rancid communal water source the people of New York City. The monies were diverted to build an election-rigging political machine morphed into the Tammany Hall operation.
As the consequences touched upon epidemic diseases, the information caught my attention. It demonstrates the policy of “never let a crisis go to waste” has always been a progressive tactic.
Prominent New Yorkers, including Alexander Hamilton, had witnessed firsthand how an outbreak of yellow fever could take thousands of lives, and bring down a city. “It is natural to be afflicted not only at the mortality which is said to obtain, but at the consequences of that undue panic which is fast depopulating the city, and suspending business both public and private,” he had written of the outbreak in Philadelphia. While Hamilton had survived his bout with the fever, other great New Yorkers had not.[Nah]…Webster’s 700-page A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases blamed different causes but settled on filth. Even America’s quarreling factions could generally agree that a cleaner city and fresh water were bound to improve the health of the city and its people.The wealthy were already able to purchase water carted over to their homes at great expense, but the lessons of Philadelphia were fresh in everyone’s minds, and people knew that a major outbreak would depopulate the city, shut down businesses, and unleash a crime wave. New York’s Federalist government and its wealthiest citizens had charitably fed the poor and the displaced during the fever outbreak. And not only for economic reasons. Some of New York’s elites were patricians, but others—like Hamilton and Burr’s future second wife, Eliza Jumel, who had been raised in a brothel—had come to wealth from humbler beginnings.New York’s ruling Federalists, many of whom—like Hamilton— were members of the Society of the Cincinnati, believed in the ideal of its namesake—the Roman leader Cincinnatus—that men of influence and wealth should step forward in an emergency before giving up power. Burr, Tammany, and their radical allies, however thought that an emergency was a pretext for seizing power and never letting it go. One side believed that a crisis should be quickly remedied, and the other that it should be permanently exploited.These two diametrically opposite ideas about power and government would collide over the search for a cure to the epidemic. The outcome shaped how our nation’s politicians still respond to crises today.
And while the past episodes are disturbingly similar to today’s dramas, Greenfield offers an upbeat conclusion: The Left eventually overreaches and its plans fall apart. Let’s hope we are seeing some of that “falling apart” nowadays.
Greenfield, who is a Shillman Journalism Fellow, is clearly passionate about history and liberty, and that comes across every page in this wonderful book.
I give the book 5 stars out of 5, for the brilliant writing, detailed information, and skill at how conveying how the past seems to be repeating itself in the present.
For those interested: Here is an interview with Greenfield discussing his book.
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