Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past by Thomas Foster (review)

Since the culture wars of the 1990s, symptoms of “founders chic” have rippled through college syllabi and scholarly prize nominations. Wave after wave of presidential biographies attract new readers by promising to reveal “the private man” for the first time. Thomas Foster’s Sex and the Founding Fathers deflates these claims by chronicling the many sexual narratives that have surrounded the founders from the eighteenth century to the present. Foster surveys the sexual lore surrounding six male founders: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris. In most cases he aspires neither to dig up new dirt nor to set the record straight in the traditional sense. Only in the final chapter on Morris does he present new insights gleaned from the private manuscripts of a (mostly) forgotten founder.

The first five chapters, based upon an examination of hundreds of popular biographies, films, novels, and journalistic tributes, offer a cultural history marked by two persistent themes. On the one hand, Foster argues that past and present Americans have mined the intimate lives of the founders for evidence of what made them extraordinary. This quest was informed by the common beliefs in both American exceptionalism and the sacredness of the individual. On the other hand, popular writers have explored the founders’ sexual antics in an effort to make their historical subjects more accessible (Foster uses the more colloquial term “relatable”) to their readers. But Foster argues that these attempts to “humanize” powerful men have also served to naturalize heterosexual desire as a defining component of American manhood. Reading his accounts, one is further struck by the ways in which popular sexual histories of the founders have deployed sexuality to reify national identity as the special inheritance of men—particularly those eligible for, and conforming to, dominant modes of masculinity.

Foster traces a generational pattern that has characterized most accounts of the founders’ sex lives. Eighteenth-century commentators openly acknowledged and sometimes celebrated various sexual expressions of masculine power. Paternity, coupled with virtuous restraint, could establish a founder’s patriarchal superiority. Alternatively, virile libertinism could posit him as one of the boys, the model citizen of a fraternal republic. With the nineteenth-century creation of a common school system, biographies of the founders became consciously didactic. A new generation imagined the most ribald among them as models of chastity, forgetting or censoring contrary evidence. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography was purged of references to his “licentious amours” so that citizens-in-training would learn only from his economic example. Textbooks containing Emanuel Leutze’s painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware were mutilated in order to prevent young eyes from wandering to the watch fob, which hangs down, emphasizing his crotch. John Adams was valorized for his reputation for virtuous restraint, his marriage to Abigail deemed presciently companionate.

This approach changed with the popularization of sexology during the early twentieth century. By the 1920s, biographers largely agreed that it was useless, even hypocritical, to repress accounts of key sexual episodes in the lives of political icons. Popular Freudians explained extraordinary men’s accomplishments as the products of sexual sublimation. Biographers incorporated these explanations and interpreted the political motives of men like Jefferson and Hamilton as evidence of their hidden fixations. Probing these deep-seated drives did not taint the image of the founders. Instead, psychoanalysis normalized them. Washington, for example, was described as passionately loving Sally Fairfax before marrying Martha Custis. This story compensated for his never having sired any (acknowledged) children of his own. Dismissing the possibilities that he might have been impotent or sexually uninterested in Martha, biographers imagined Washington playing the field before choosing a “wholesome” wife and settling into a life of virtuous domesticity.

Significantly, writers in each period agreed that the intimate behavior of a political leader merited scrutiny by Americans at large. From this perspective, there...