BOOKS: 'Empire of Liberty'

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The hard truth that emerges from Mr. Wood's narrative is that many of our most marbleized Founding heroes were frightful snobs who were inept at the mechanics of government, ignoramuses about economic realities and fatally estranged from the very people they sought to lead. None of our first three presidents comes out of the story very well.

Washington has the easiest time of it because the Congress was mostly cowed by his majestic reputation and he had no Supreme Court to speak of to question some of his executive decisions.

John Adams, who could be insulted by a rainbow, rushed from one wild extreme to another in an ultimately failed bid to halt the tidal changes sweeping the nation both internally and from abroad.

His successor, Thomas Jefferson, was an odd choice for the pro-democracy mob that swept the old guard from power. The ultimate intellectual snob, Jefferson comes off as an 18th-century version of the late Eugene McCarthy, full of utopian ideas that come and go, full of high-sounding rhetoric and full of himself. But all three were constantly vexed by the American mass populace.

Mr. Wood is at his best when he chronicles the astonishing changes that were occurring in what had been 13 tiny Colonies perched along the Atlantic Seaboard.

After the war ended, the population resumed doubling every 20 years; settled states such as New York saw their citizenry quadruple during this period, and by 1820, what had been the far frontier of Ohio had come to have more people than any of the prewar Colonies. While agriculture still was the predominant economic activity, manufacturing and trade in a cornucopia of products began to reach markets around the globe. As he notes:

"All these demographic and commercial changes could not help but affect every aspect of American life. Politics became democratized as more Americans gained the right to vote. The essentially aristocratic world of the Founding Fathers in which gentry leaders stood for election was largely replaced by a very different democratic world, a recognizably modern world of competing professional politicians who ran for office under the banners of modern political parties.

"Indeed, Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period's political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was devoted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy. Most important, perhaps ordinary Americans developed a keen sense of their own worth — a sense, that, living in the freest nation in the world, they were anybody's equal."

That last is an important point. Contrary to the history learned at mother's knee, our beloved Constitution was in reality a reaction against the democratic lunacies, self-enrichment schemes and beggar-thy-neighbor enactments of those sovereign states that still insisted that the very phrase "the United States" was a plural construct.

Does this book advance our knowledge of the time? Decidedly yes. Is this book well-written? Yes again. And well-edited? Alas, it is not.

At 738 pages, the narrative is about 200 pages too long, and after a while, the repetitions of Mr. Wood's main points about the rise of the forces of democracy become tedious and water down the impact of what is important scholarship.

Despite that, this is an important book that needs to be read. Take the time.

• James Srodes is a Washington author whose latest book is "Franklin: The Essential Founding Father." His e-mail address is: srodesnews@msn.com.