Sprawl of an American dynasty
“dynasty” is a strong word. but as the intergenerational story of the blood family unspools from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, their power and reach proves truly astonishing. thomas blood, born Irish in 1618, became one of the most famous thieves in england when he stole the crown jewels from the tower of london, then talked charles II into pardoning him and giving him a job. His nephews — robert, John, and James blood — sailed to the new World, helped found concord, and became notorious rabble-rousers bent on disrupting cotton Mather’s puritanical paradise. In 1775, thaddeus blood witnessed the “shot heard ‘round the world” at the battle of concord and lived to tell ralph Waldo emerson his notably unheroic version of the events. Almost a century later, James clinton blood helped found the antislavery town of lawrence, Kansas, then tried unsuccessfully to moderate the more radical abolitionism of John brown himself. perez blood, a recluse and astronomer, helped shape Henry david thoreau’s concept of freedom.
the propensity of one blood or another to appear at major turning points of American history almost defies belief. so when Kaag announces after several chapters that “here’s where the story becomes genuinely wild,” it is hard to imagine what could possibly come next. What follows is the account of James Harvey blood, a man who married Victoria Woodhull, perhaps the most unmarriageable woman of her generation. Woodhull was a spiritualist who mesmerized audiences, bamboozled industrialists, proclaimed her right to “love whom I may” and “to change that love every day if I please,” and was the first woman to run for president. In this American history, a blood is everywhere.
As he has done beautifully in other books, Kaag weaves philosophy throughout this history. through thomas blood’s crown jewel heist, we learn about thomas Hobbes’s advice to traitors and John locke’s theory of natural rights. Astronomer perez blood’s friendship with thoreau illustrates Isaiah berlin’s distinction between positive and negative freedom. to explain how Aretas blood’s steam engine factory in lowell — at one point among the largest in the world — helped put Manifest destiny on the fast track, Kaag introduces the work of John stuart Mill and Karl Marx. through the blood line, we also learn about wrenching contradictions embodied by these freedom seekers and the philosophies that sustained them. the original American bloods were “longstanding enslavers.” later bloods reinvented a captive workforce in the sweatshops of lowell. Women are scarce in this story, but Kaag pauses to consider lavinia blood’s philanthropy, made possible by her husband’s soulcrushing exploitation of his workers. He compares this questionable virtue to philosopher Jane Addams’s work with those whose lives were wrecked by the relentless capitalism the bloods embraced.
At long last, the blood family produced its own philosopher: benjamin blood. this blood became a beacon of hope to none other than American pragmatist William James. “not unfortunately, the universe is wild,” blood wrote; “nature is miracle all.” “Your thought is obscure — lightning flashes, darting gleams — but that is the way the truth is,” James responded. on his deathbed, James repaid the intellectual debt he owed blood by recommending him as an “author of rare quality” and comparing him to nietzsche.
From this motley crew of thieves, theorists, and seers, Kaag extracts a blood family philosophy: “ever not quite.” Whether they were stealing jewels, rejecting pieties, participating in John brown’s unfinished project of racial reckoning, or helping America’s own philosophers learn how to be American, the bloods were always, Kaag claims, guided by a “practical idealism — pluralistic, creative, dangerous.” It all makes a kind of wild, unruly sense. “Activity, heroism, and sheer willingness — bordering on madness,” Kaag writes, “is what all the bloods, beginning with the jewel thief thomas, were after.”
“American bloods” is a boisterous tour of history and philosophy, framed by Kaag’s own philosophical convictions and informed by his lived experience. Was it a wolf he saw near the swamp? In the end, it doesn’t matter. Following the bloods’ example, Kaag has seized on wildness as part of his own American heritage. by embracing the mysterious gift of a manuscript in a hidden room, Kaag has made the story of the bloods a gift to us all.