Take the Miser from the Earth
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I’m reading a book by Tom Shachtman, a filmmaker, educator, and author of 40 books on a wide range of deeply researched topics, from cold temperatures to the history of the United States.
The title of the book I’m reading is GENTLEMEN SCIENTISTS AND REVOLUTIONARIES — The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment (2014) — part of a trilogy on the American Revolution, the other two being THE FOUNDING FORTUNES (2020) and HOW THE FRENCH SAVED AMERICA (2017).
David Rittenhouse
In that highly interesting book I found an eerie passage in the speech by David Rittenhouse in his address to the American Philosophical Society at its annual gathering in Philadelphia on February 24, 1775.
I learned from Shachtman’s book that Rittenhouse, along with Tom Paine and Benjamin Rush, was one of the “three rhetorical forebears of the Declaration of Independence.” The American Philosophical Society, still in existence today, was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin and others under the name “Philosophical Society” as discussion forum of philosophers and scientists. It was formed in the colonies in an attempt to emulate the Royal Society in London as a distinguished intellectual forum at a time when the colonies started to assert their independence.
I don’t have to name names to invoke the relevance of this passage to the version of the United States we find ourselves in today.
“Take the miser from the earth, if it is possible to disengage him, he whose nightly rest has been broken by the loss of a single foot of it, useless perhaps to him, and remove him to the planet Mars. . . . Persuade the ambitious monarch to accompany him [there]. . .”
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