Is it possible to enjoy a book but despise its author?
John Kaag’s American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation (Macmillan Publishers; 288 pages; $28.00), scheduled to be released next month, examines “one of America’s first and most expansive pioneer families, which explored, and laid claim to, the frontiers — geographic, political, intellectual, and spiritual — that became the very core of a nation.”
Kaag, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, has an intimately personal connection to the clan. He lives in a house built by Josiah Blood in 1745, and late one night, in a tiny, secret room, the scholar discovered “a stack of yellowing paper, an inch thick, bound with a rubber band.” Published privately in 1960, THE STORY OF THE BLOODS kicked off Kaag’s quest to document “one of America’s wildest families.”
A “philosopher and intellectual historian” who has spent “the better part” of his life “in old libraries, remote archives, and forgotten studies,” Kaag was equipped for the legwork. Unfortunately, as a professional academic who doubtless desires to keep his tenure, boost his reputation, and regularly secure book deals, his thoughts about what he discovered are predictably pedantic. Finding the slimmest beam of daylight between Kaag and The Atlantic, National Public Radio, and the Southern Poverty Law Center would surely be a fool’s errand. American Bloods is suffused with warmed-over wokery — e.g., America “was completely underpinned” by slavery, Indian tribes “killed the fewest number of buffalo required to survive, and took pains not to waste anything,” every 19th century woman was trapped “in a culture that intended to render her powerless.”
Worst of all, Kaag appears to be a Marxist.
Seriously.
Karl Marx.
The book’s glimpse at Vermont-born industrialist Aretas Blood liberally quotes the vapid, selfish sluggard, whose crackbrained ideology inspired its most fervent adherents to amass mountains of corpses.
But still. American Bloods offers fascinating vignettes. Thaddeus Blood was the last living veteran of the Battle of Concord when Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him, in the mid-1830s, to obtain an eyewitness account of “the most pivotal moment of American history.” (“If the United States was born at the end of the war in 1781, American Bloods were present at the conception.”) James Blood narrowly avoided death during the Lawrence Massacre, when Quantrill’s Raiders butchered over 100 unarmed men and boys. James Harvey Blood, “wounded several times” during the War Between the States, became “half anarchist, half socialist, and 100 percent mystic.” (His marriage to a medium, feminist, and “free lover” did not end well.)
Unsurprisingly, given its author’s bailiwick, Kaag’s book shines brightest when it assesses the impact two members of the family had on two giants of American philosophy. (Stay in your lane, prof.)
Perez Blood was “a cultivated man who willingly lived in uncultivated hinterlands.” Never marrying, he dedicated himself to stargazing, and possessed, as Henry David Thoreau realized, “a unique talent … to live simply yet think deeply.” Both men saw themselves as “‘cosmopolitan’ in the most literal sense of the word.” And Thoreau “could see his future self in Blood: an educated man, unmarried but tethered to his family of origin, a man who would defy the expectations of his practically minded neighbors, retreat to the wilderness, and spend his last years in the contemplation and careful observation of nature.”
Decades later, Benjamin Paul Blood had a similar influence on Williams James. Born in Amsterdam, New York, in 1832, and “mad in just the right way,” the “seer-mystic” believed that men discovered themselves “at the limits of reality, in an act of transcendence.” Drugs helped — Blood penned perhaps “the first detailed account of a psychedelic trip in the United States.” James, a decade younger, “was drawn to the promise of a wild universe, to the idea that there was always something yet to be explored, a remainder that could not be tabulated, an unknown animal that would never be seen again.” The “father of American psychology” and the proto-hippie corresponded for decades. In an 1896 letter, James “echoes his friend”:
Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise; but it isn’t reason that will ever do it. Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor make-shift. I take it that no man is ever educated who has never dallied with that thought of suicide.
John Kaag might be an insufferable simp, but the men he profiles in American Bloods weren’t.
I like Loners, I like Emerson & Thoreau and I like REAL History, so maybe I need to check it out. Strange how things that happened early in our Countries History have effected so much of what is happening now.