A Necessary Evil: A History of Ameri-can Distrust of Government.

Garry Wills (who will be speaking at the Legislative Staff Breakfast during the NCSL Annual Meeting in Chi-cago) has written on some of the most relevant shapers of American government-- Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Nixon and Reagan--and in this book takes a hard look at an American trait that has lasted through all their administrations: distrust of the federal government.

A Necessary Evil: A History of Ameri-can Distrust of Government by Garry Wills, Simon and Schuster, New York, N.Y., 1999. 365 pages, $25.

Wills recounts the outstanding demonstrations of that distrust from Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786 (important for spurring support for a stronger central government), through the difficulties the Southern Confederacy had in exerting authority on its side of the Mason-Dixon line, down to the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

This quick survey of two centuries of American cussedness will remind readers of some events they have probably forgotten (like the Whiskey Rebellion and the Hartford Convention) and some features of American belligerency that may never have caught their notice (like the way Northern as well as Southern states, have argued for states' rights and nullification when they have been sufficiently put upon).

These tales from our past illustrate for Wills the strange way that Americans have found justification in the Constitution for resistance to the federal government. As early as 1798--when the Constitution was barely a decade old--Thomas Jefferson found constitutional reasons to think that a state could declare a federal law null and void. John C. Calhoun and whole generations of later Southerners found constitutional justification for secession, arguing in effect that the Constitution provides for the destruction of the Union it was written to strengthen. Even Timothy McVeigh, Wills suggests, found Constitutional justification for his bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, perhaps by means of Jefferson's vindication of Shays' Rebellion: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots[ldots]."

Wills says that many, perhaps most, Americans agree with Henry David Thoreau, not only that "that government is best which governs least," but also that "that government is best which governs not at all." This visceral individualism runs so deep, Wills says, that Americans have persistently misremembered their history to believe that the writers of the Constitution intentionally designed a weak, divided and inept national government and that the Constitution justified resistance to the government it purports to create.

Americans can believe this, Wills says, because they accept the reasoning of those who argued against the Constitution in 1787 and 1788 and twist the words of its proponents, like James Madison, to support antigovernment views. Even Madison, an advocate of a stronger central government than the Constitution established, fell into this trap when arguing against policies of the Adams administration in 1798. And for the rest of his life, he had to live with the embarrassment of American sectionalists quoting him on both sides of the issue.

Wills is having none of it. He argues vigorously that the Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights added to it in the 1790s do not in any way provide arguments for forcible resistance to government. Its supporters were not of two minds about the need for strong central government in the United States. Indeed, if James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, had had his way, states' authority would have been diminished far more than it was, and no notion of "state sovereignty" would have survived 1787. And this is as it should be, says Wills, for it is vigorous government that is the true defender of rights and liberty, not resistance to government.

Many readers of this magazine will disagree in part or in whole with Wills' interpretation of the Constitution and American history. But anyone who is concerned with these issues should read A Necessary Evil for the vigor of its reasoning, its learning, and its splendid writing.