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

• Author: Snell, Ronald K.
• Position: Review

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...