DANBURY, CONN. — Western Connecticut State University historian Dr. Kevin R.C. Gutzman has earned an international reputation as a constitutional scholar unafraid of challenging popular assumptions about the origins and evolution of America’s founding document, and his new biography of James Madison demands a fresh examination of the fourth president’s role in the nation’s birth.

Gutzman’s work, “James Madison and the Making of America,” offers a rich exploration of Madison’s legacy, from his emergence as a young Virginian delegate leading the successful campaign for the commonwealth’s landmark Statute for Religious Freedom to his lasting influence as Federalist Papers author, congressional leader and president in the shaping of the young nation’s political institutions. The biography, which marks the fourth book on American and constitutional history authored by Gutzman, will be released by his publisher, St. Martin’s Press, on Feb. 14 and has been chosen as one of the main selections offered by the History Book Club in February.

Gutzman will present a reading and sign copies of “James Madison and the Making of America” at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 13, 2012, on the first floor of Warner Hall on the WCSU Midtown campus, 181 White St. in Danbury. Admission will be free and the public is invited to attend; light refreshments will be served.

Gutzman is the author of the New York Times best-seller “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution,” as well as “Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840.” With Thomas Woods Jr., he coauthored “Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to Barack Obama.” He has lectured extensively on constitutional founding principles and contemporary issues, and his commentaries have appeared widely in the national broadcast and print media. He is a professor of history and non-Western cultures at Western, where his classes explore constitutional history and the history of the American Revolution, the early American republic and the American South.

Pulitizer Prize-winning author Daniel Walker Howe observed that Gutzman’s new book is “deeply rewarding for the serious reader who wants a detailed account of James Madison’s long public career.” Edward Lengel, editor-in-chief of “The Papers of George Washington” at the University of Virginia, remarked, “Gutzman’s beautifully written and insightful account promises to become the standard biography of the great Founding Father.”

In a recent interview at his Warner Hall office on WCSU’s Midtown campus, Gutzman described the biography as the fulfillment of a work that gradually took shape over nearly two decades of recurring brushes with Madison’s writings on politics and government that began during the author’s graduate studies at the University of Virginia, where he earned his Ph.D. in history in 1999. “I noticed in working on my dissertation about Virginia’s domestic politics how often Madison was misunderstood, even by those who used the original sources for their research,” he noted. After publishing several scholarly journal essays in recent years that went “100 percent contrary to the ‘accepted version’ of Madison,” Gutzman decided to take on the ambitious task of reevaluating the Founding Father’s historical and constitutional legacies, from the Constitution and Bill of Rights to the War of 1812, in a comprehensive biography.

“What interested me about Madison was the way in which his intellectual and political projects still affect us,” he said. “My interest was not so much in Madison as private citizen, but more in Madison as the architect of major mileposts in the development of constitutionalism and thinking about government.” Though he was much more a skilled practitioner than philosopher of politics and government, “he was one of the most original thinkers who ever pursued a political career in the United States,” Gutzman said.

“James Madison was a highly cerebral man with a towering intellect, an aristocratic politician who devoted his life to the establishment of republican government in America — government by the people, represented by elected officials and legislators responsible to the people who chose them,” the author observed. “In more than 40 years of public service, Madison had a notable effect everywhere he served,” from the constitutional convention to congressional leadership and his presidential administration from 1809 to 1817. “In every public position he held, his presence always made a significant difference.”

In many ways, Madison was an unlikely giant of the generation who founded the American republic — slight and short in build, reserved by nature, scarcely audible at times in public speaking. Yet at the age of 25 this graduate of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, found himself at center stage in the Virginia constitutional convention that produced the first written constitution for government in the world. He subsequently led the Virginia delegation and drafted the “Virginia Plan” submitted to the federal constitutional convention in 1787.

“Madison is often called the ‘father of the Constitution,’ and his Virginia Plan has often been described as a rough draft of the Constitution. But in fact, it was at marked variance with the Constitution we ended up with,” Gutzman observed. Although Madison advanced arguments for ratification of the Constitution in the Federalist Papers and played a central role in drafting the Bill of Rights — in part as a strategic initiative to secure constitutional ratification by his home state of Virginia — he also expressed ambivalence in a letter to his mentor and friend Thomas Jefferson suggesting “the Constitution was so markedly flawed that it would surely fail within a few years.

“So perhaps,” Gutzman wryly observed, “it would be more accurate to describe him as the ‘unhappy stepfather of the Constitution.’”

On the other hand, Madison often is overshadowed by Jefferson as chief architect of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which inspired the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment that provides the constitutional basis for the separation of church and state. Gutzman noted that it was Madison who led a successful campaign against commonwealth assessments to support churches, and who built on that victory to gain referendum approval of Jefferson’s religious freedom statute in Virginia.

“It’s fair to say that Madison was responsible for getting the Statute for Religious Freedom passed,” he said. “He stood throughout his life for the disengagement of religion from government; he opposed official proclamations of thanksgiving, religious commemorations, even chaplains in the military and Congress. He took the lead in setting forth the notion that government should not be involved in religion, and religion as an institution should not be involved in government.”

Madison also shared with Jefferson a profound distrust for creation of a standing national army, preferring instead to rely on mobilization of popular militias in times of war. The major flaw in this argument was exposed when Madison and Congress declared war on the United Kingdom in 1812, only to find the capital defenseless and the national government forced into flight to escape a far superior British invasion force. Yet Gutzman said that if the War of 1812 provided a sobering lesson in the risks of waging war without a professional military, contemporary political leaders would do well to revisit the wisdom of the Founding Fathers’ aversion to “foreign entanglements” and their potential impact on democratic government.

“Madison held the position of the founding generation that if you had constant wars and a network of alliances, these would lead to more centralization of authority in the executive, more taxation, more secrecy in government, less accountability, more loss of lives, and more enemies overseas,” Gutzman said. “If you have permanent war, they argued, it would be the end of republican government because you have more and more concentration of power in the hands of the executive.”

Gutzman noted that Madison issued just three vetoes during his presidency: “Our early presidents used the veto power not to insert themselves in the legislative process, but rather as a way to police the boundaries of Congress’s constitutional authority.” The most significant was his veto shortly before leaving office of congressional legislation that would have committed federal resources to a nationwide project for building canals, roads and bridges — an infrastructure expenditure that he recognized as justified yet, he argued, beyond the specific powers given to Congress in the Constitution. “Madison saw this as a valedictory opportunity to remind the people that the Constitution should be read just the way it was written and ratified,” the author said.

Madison’s most enduring legacy remains his work throughout his public life to shape the young nation’s founding ideal of republican government by popular consent, Gutzman observed.

“Madison and American written constitutions are joined at the hip,” he said. “The only reason you have a constitution is to limit the powers of government, and Madison’s whole career is all about defining the proper sphere of government.

“Madison sought to instruct the nation what it means to say that the people have consented to government,” Gutzman remarked. “If you reach the point where it doesn’t matter what the people have consented to, ultimately it means we have become a government without popular consent.”

For information, contact the WCSU Office of University Relations at (203) 837-8486.

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