Going back in time and showing Dante comics so he can annotate the Divine Comedy with things like “* See the Roman general who defeated Hannibal in the Second Punic War! - Ed.”
Having three kids is tough, and it’s always easier to talk about the hard stuff, so sometimes that’s all you talk about with parents of singletons or non-parents. But there’s so much good stuff, too, and I worry that gets lost. Ultimately there’s just more variance—three kids can come up with so so many extraordinary ways to be destructive or exasperating, sure, but they can also be creative and silly and loving in ways you never would have imagined. The chaos isn’t a thing to struggle against, it’s generative—it makes your family’s world, for better and for worse. It’s an incredible thing. It’s so much, so so much. I can’t imagine anything else.
arnold schwarzenegger’s life story is so unbelievable that him marrying jfk’s niece is just another detail like yeah sure whatever that might as well happen
this is my OC his dad beat him so he started lifting and became literally the most swole guy in the world and a millionaire and then one of the world’s most famous movie stars and married the president’s niece and was elected governor.
The gym he broke into was the Athletik Union Graz and the year was something like 1962, and the thing about that specific gym at that specific moment is that it was one of maybe a dozen serious weightlifting facilities in the entire German-speaking world, because postwar Austria's relationship to strength culture was basically nonexistent — the Habsburg-era physical culture tradition (turnvereine, that whole gymnastics-as-civic-virtue Jahn-derived thing) had been so thoroughly captured by the Nazis and then so thoroughly discredited by association that "guy who lifts heavy weights" in 1962 Austria was a sort of cultural orphan, a thing that read as either vaguely fascist or vaguely homosexual or both, and you basically couldn't do it unless you found one of these tiny enthusiast clubs hidden behind nondescript doors in working-class neighborhoods, which Arnold did at fifteen, because Kurt Marnul (the former Mr. Austria) saw him at a swimming pool and invited him in.
Marnul. Mr. Austria. Take a second with that.
The reason "Mr. Austria" existed as a title in 1961 is that there was already an international circuit for physique competition by then, with judges and rules and weight classes and a federation, and the federation was the IFBB, which had been founded in 1946 in Montreal by a Jewish-Canadian kid named Joe Weider whose entire business model was building an alternative institutional infrastructure for bodybuilding because the Amateur Athletic Union, which had a monopoly on American physique events through the 1940s, treated the sport as a sideshow attached to weightlifting meets and was run by a guy named Bob Hoffman who hated Weider personally and ideologically and was essentially trying to crush him. The IFBB existed because of a beef between a York, Pennsylvania barbell magnate and a Montreal kid with a magazine. That's the whole origin story. Two guys in the supplement business hating each other, splitting the sport, and one of them — Weider, the upstart — turning out to be much, much better at marketing.
Weider had Your Physique magazine starting in 1940, then Muscle Builder, then Muscle & Fitness, plus a barbell company, plus Weider Nutrition (founded 1936, which makes it the oldest sports supplement company in North America, basically the original protein-powder mail-order business), plus Mr. America magazine, plus a string of frankly homoerotic publications with titles like The Young Physique and Muscle Boy and Demi-Gods that he kept getting in trouble with postal inspectors over, plus eventually the Mr. Olympia contest, which he created in 1965 specifically as the IFBB's professional summit, the thing you couldn't enter unless you were already at the top, the title above all titles. He created Mr. Olympia in 1965. Arnold won his first one in 1970, at twenty-three, and his seventh in 1980. The contest is FIVE YEARS older than Arnold's first victory at it. The whole thing is being built around him in real time.
This is the part that the "unbelievable life story" framing tends to flatten. When you say Arnold became the most famous bodybuilder in the world, you're describing what is, in absolute terms, a tiny group — there was no broad American interest in bodybuilding in 1970, there were maybe a few thousand guys in the country who cared about the Mr. Olympia title, the magazines were niche, the competitions were held in catering halls. Joe Weider needed a vehicle. He needed somebody who could carry the magazines and the supplements and the equipment line and ideally the whole ideological project (which was: muscle is American, muscle is masculine, muscle is wholesome, muscle is the body of the future, please buy our amino acid pills) on his back, both metaphorically and very nearly literally, and what he got — what he plucked out of Munich in 1968 and brought to Santa Monica — was a 6'2" Austrian who had been chasing this exact role since he was thirteen because he'd seen Reg Park play Hercules in an Italian peplum movie and decided that was who he was going to be.
The Reg Park detail matters. Park was a British bodybuilder who'd played Hercules in Hercules and the Captive Women (1961) and a string of other Italian sword-and-sandal movies, and Steve Reeves (American, Hercules in the actual canonical 1958 Hercules) had done the same circuit. There was already a pipeline by the early 60s: win Mr. Universe, get cast in Italian peplum, become an international action star. Arnold didn't invent that arc. He just executed it harder than anyone else.
(The peplum cycle itself is its own weird industrial story — postwar Italian cinema discovered they could make swords-and-sandals movies cheap because Cinecittà had infrastructure left over from Mussolini's failed propaganda-film-industry buildout, and they started shooting the things in three weeks each and dubbing them into every language on earth, and the genre needed huge-bodied protagonists because the source material was basically Greek myth via 19th century strongman acts, and where do you get huge-bodied protagonists in 1958? You import them from Muscle Beach. The thing that connects Santa Monica to Cinecittà to the Athletik Union Graz is that they were all parts of the same supply chain.)
Muscle Beach, by the way, is a public weightlifting platform. Just a platform. Built in 1934 in Santa Monica by the WPA, which is to say built by the federal government as Depression-era public works, which is to say American bodybuilding's most famous geographic locus is a New Deal project — and then the gymnasts and acrobats and lifters started showing up because where else were they going to go, and by the 40s it was the cultural center of West Coast physique culture, and by the 50s every Mr. America was hanging out there hoping to get cast in a Hercules movie, and Joe Gold, who'd been part of Mae West's vaudeville troupe (yes, that Mae West, she had a strongman act in her Vegas show because of course she did), opened Gold's Gym a few blocks inland in 1965, three years before Arnold arrived. The whole physical infrastructure was already assembled. Arnold didn't found anything. He showed up at the gym and the gym was waiting for him.
The gym was waiting for him.
Now: the Maria Shriver thing. The reblog frames this as just one more wild detail in an already wild life, like, "and on top of everything else, he married a Kennedy," and the reblog is right that it's funny but it's funny in a more specific way than the reblog identifies. Tom Brokaw introduced them at the 1977 Robert F. Kennedy Pro-Celebrity Tennis Tournament in Forest Hills. That's the setting. A celebrity tennis tournament named for an assassinated senator and run by the family as a charitable thing. Arnold was there because by 1977 he was already, for purposes of New York charity-circuit social geography, A Celebrity — Pumping Iron had come out that year, he'd done Stay Hungry the year before, he was a recognizable presence on talk shows and in magazines, and the Kennedy operation, which was always extremely good at noticing rising figures and pulling them into the family orbit, had noticed.
Maria's mother Eunice was JFK's sister, yes, but Eunice's main project at this point was the Special Olympics, which she'd founded in 1968, and the Special Olympics was the kind of thing that got a lot of its visibility through celebrity ambassadors and charity events of exactly the sort where you'd cross paths with an Austrian bodybuilder turned actor who was famous for being huge and famous for being on television. Eunice's husband Sargent Shriver had run the Peace Corps, then OEO, then been the 1972 Democratic VP nominee. The family was a charity-and-political nexus that absorbed people who could be useful or interesting, and Arnold in 1977 was both. He was going to marry into this regardless of who he met first. The institutional gravity was already working on him.
He became a Republican. This is sometimes treated as ironic given the Kennedy connection but it actually fits the structure perfectly — by the late 70s and into the 80s the Kennedy clan was already starting to function less as a coherent political movement and more as a sort of permanent American aristocracy that could absorb members across ideological lines as long as they had national-celebrity wattage and were willing to play the family game. Arnold played the family game. He campaigned for George H.W. Bush, got named Chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness in 1990, was friends with everyone in both parties because being friends with everyone in both parties was the asset he was actually trading on. The marriage worked, structurally, for both sides. Maria got a husband who was the most famous person on earth in the late 80s and early 90s. The Kennedys got their first international entertainment-industry colossus since whoever you want to name. Arnold got the political infrastructure that would, twenty-six years later, deliver him the California governor's mansion in a recall election that nobody, in 1986, would have predicted, because in 1986 nobody knew there was going to BE a recall election, but the apparatus that allowed him to win it was being assembled at the wedding.
The wedding was at St. Francis Xavier in Hyannis. Caroline Kennedy was maid of honor. Franco Columbu — Sardinian, Mr. Olympia 1976 and 1981, Arnold's training partner since the Munich days, a guy he'd met when they were both teenagers lifting in cold European gyms — was best man. The two halves of his life standing on either side of the altar, and the two halves were never separate to begin with. The bodybuilding pipeline that brought him to America and the celebrity-charity-political pipeline that married him into Hyannis Port were two branches of the same midcentury American institutional system for absorbing useful foreigners and converting them into domestic assets. Arnold was the highest-yield asset that system ever produced.
A note on the father, because the OP brings him up and this is where the "his dad beat him so he started lifting" framing does a lot of damage. Gustav Schwarzenegger was a small-town Austrian cop who'd applied to the Nazi Party on March 1, 1938 (two weeks before the Anschluss, eight months before Kristallnacht — the chronology matters: he was an Austrian Nazi before there was a German Austria), then joined the SA in May 1939, and then served in the Wehrmacht through the invasions of Poland and France and the siege of Leningrad, where he was wounded, and then came home with what we'd now call PTSD and what 1947 Austria called "well, that's just dad" and beat his kids with a leather strap. He's not unique in his cohort. He's not even unusual. The thing to understand about postwar rural Austria is that approximately every man between thirty and sixty had this exact biography in 1955, with minor variations on which front and which paramilitary organization and how badly wounded — denazification in the Austrian zone was famously cosmetic, the official Austrian state line was that they had been Hitler's First Victim rather than enthusiastic participants, and so there was no real social reckoning with what these men had done or what it had done to them, just a generation of shell-shocked alcoholic ex-Nazis raising kids in unheated apartments without running water, which was Arnold's actual upbringing, in Thal, in a house with no plumbing, where his job before school was to walk to the well.
The "abuse drove him to lift" story is not exactly wrong. But the more accurate story is that postwar Austrian rural patriarchy was so thoroughly broken by what the patriarchs had done in 1939-45 that an entire generation of sons looked at their fathers and decided whatever they were going to be, it would not be that, and the available models for what to be were largely imported — American GIs, John Wayne movies, Steve Reeves doing Hercules — and Arnold, who was reading Joe Weider magazines at fifteen, just chose more decisively and executed harder than the rest of his cohort. The pull was American. The push was Austrian. The vector was bodybuilding because Joe Weider had spent thirty years building the institutional rails for that specific ambition to travel on.
He bought the tank. The M47 Patton he drove during his year in the Austrian Army in 1965 — he bought it from the Austrian government in 1991 or 1992, paid $20,000, had it shipped to California, uses it for charity events, lets kids climb on it. This is a guy who at one point during basic training challenged a friend to race tanks down a hill at night with fifteen guys riding on top and several of them fell off and they got six hours of mud-crawl punishment for it. He was twenty years old. He'd already been training seriously for five years. He won Junior Mr. Europe while he was in the brig for going AWOL to attend the contest. The army gave him a makeshift gym and extra food because they figured out pretty quickly that they had Junior Mr. Europe in their barracks and they might as well get the publicity.
Same as it ever was. Or rather, not really, because the conjunction of factors that produced Arnold — postwar Austrian rural deprivation, an Austrian Army with enough institutional flexibility to support a bodybuilding kid, a Joe Weider-built international physique infrastructure waiting for an export-quality talent, an Italian peplum-cinema pipeline still half-functional in the late 60s, a Hollywood studio system willing to cast a thick-accented foreigner in lead roles by the early 80s, a Kennedy charity-tennis circuit looking to absorb celebrities, and a California Republican Party desperate enough by 2003 to nominate basically anyone with statewide name recognition — that conjunction was extremely specific and extremely 20th century and is not coming around again. The story isn't unbelievable. The story is that the institutional rails happened to all be in place at exactly the right moment for one specific kid who'd been training in a closed gym in Graz on weekends to ride them all the way to Sacramento, and then the rails got pulled up behind him, and now you couldn't do it again if you tried.
The breaking-into-the-gym detail is the right detail to focus on, though, because it's the moment before any of the rails matter. It's just a kid. The institutional machinery needed something to put on the train, and the something it got was a kid willing to commit minor property crime to use a barbell when the door was locked, which turned out to be exactly the right disposition for what came next.
It’s important to point out that conservative comedians on Twitter are now insane in *exactly the same way* that Tumblr users in 2014 were about Steven Universe.
just thinking there should be an HBO series about this man. Aaron Burr was once a founding father in the same way Lucifer was once an angel. So to give potential show runners ideas:
on Aaron Burr, every weird thing, and why he thought he could just go start a country
Okay so the thing you have to understand about Burr, the thing that organizes all the weird anecdotes and there are a LOT of weird anecdotes, is that he was running an 18th-century political career inside a country that was, in real time, over about a fifteen-year window, abolishing the 18th-century political career. He's the last specimen of a type. The type stopped working while he was still trying to be it. Everything else is downstream of that.
His maternal grandfather was Jonathan Edwards. The "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" guy. The closest thing the colonies produced to a world-historical intellectual, the engine of the Great Awakening, and it is wild that this is the same family, because the grandson becomes the most notorious libertine of the early Republic, but it's also not that wild when you look at how power actually moved, because the way Edwards operated inside Presbyterian church politics — factions, patronage, personal loyalty, men of quality recognizing each other and cutting deals — was structurally not that different from how civil politics worked. Same machine, different sanctuary.
And then both his parents died before he was three. His father, Aaron Burr Sr., second president of the College of New Jersey, which is Princeton — dead. His mother, then both grandparents, all inside about a year. The most spectacular Calvinist pedigree in North America collapses into one orphaned toddler.
He entered Princeton at thirteen and graduated at sixteen, which was fast even for a period when "college" was a thing rich boys did at an age we'd now call middle school.
Then the war, and this is where you start to see the type in action, because the young Burr's war is pure 18th-century lawyer-adventurer: you attach yourself to a bold venture, you perform conspicuous personal valor, you accumulate a reputation as an individual man of parts. He's nineteen and studying law in Connecticut and he immediately throws in with Benedict Arnold's expedition to Quebec — the famous one, the death march through the Maine wilderness, three hundred-plus miles of bog and starvation where Arnold's men are eating their dogs and boiling their shoes.
Burr does the whole thing. Arnold's phrase for him is "great spirit and resolution."
Then Arnold sends him up the Saint Lawrence in winter to make contact with General Montgomery, and one version has him doing this leg disguised as a Catholic priest, slipping through British lines into Montreal. (Treat the priest costume as well-circulated rather than nailed down. It's the kind of detail that attaches to a man like a burr, no pun, fine, pun.)
Montgomery liked him, made him an aide-de-camp. And then at the Battle of Quebec on the last day of 1775 Montgomery gets cut down by grapeshot in the opening minutes, and the legend — every Burr biography runs it — is that the teenage Burr tried to carry the general's body off the field under fire and had to give it up because Montgomery was a big man and the snow was deep and a kid can only drag a corpse so far.
He failed. The body stayed.
But the attempt, the image of it, the kind of thing that makes a national reputation in 1776 — that worked. That's the currency. Personal conspicuous gallantry, witnessed, retold.
He lands on Washington's staff after that and quits in something like two weeks. They did not get along. Nobody's ever fully nailed down why, and there's a whole cottage industry of speculation — Burr saw something at headquarters, or it was just two extremely vain men in a small room — but the relevant thing is that Burr's whole mode was peer-to-peer, charm-the-principal, deal-among-equals, and Washington was busy becoming the one American who was nobody's peer. Bad chemistry, structurally. He goes off to serve under Israel Putnam instead, "Old Put," and during the retreat from Lower Manhattan after the Battle of Long Island he's credited with marching an entire stranded brigade out of a closing British trap and getting the whole unit out clean.
So before he's twenty-two: dead theologian grandfather, the death march, the priest disguise, the general's body in the snow, the fortnight with Washington that maybe poisoned the rest of his life, and a brigade extracted from a trap. And here's the thing — this is the boring part of the biography. We haven't gotten to anything weird yet.
Now I want to do the Hamilton thing properly, because it can't just be the duel, and the duel doesn't make sense without it.
They orbited each other for fifteen years in the same small New York legal-political world — and it really was small, a few dozen serious lawyers in the whole city. They tried cases on the same side. They tried cases against each other. You could be working to destroy a man's entire political project and also be his co-counsel in the same week, and that wasn't hypocrisy, that was just how the profession ran. Hamilton was the Federalist: Treasury, the Bank of New York, the man who built the actual financial plumbing of the country and believed in it with religious intensity. Burr was the Republican operator working the other side of the same town.
And the thing that braids them together tightest — tighter than Weehawken — is a bank pretending to be a water company.
Okay so. New York in 1799 is dying of bad water. The Collect Pond, the old freshwater source, has been turned into an open sewer by the tanneries and slaughterhouses ringing it, and yellow fever is coming through every summer and killing people by the thousands, because nobody understands the mosquitoes yet but everybody can see the water is poison. So a private company gets chartered to fix it: the Manhattan Company. Burr runs the charter effort and brings Hamilton and a bunch of other Federalists aboard, selling it as the civic-minded private alternative to a tax-funded public waterworks. Hamilton lends his name to the water pitch.
And then Burr slips a clause into the charter — surplus capital may be used in any monied transaction not inconsistent with the law — and that one sentence, dropped in near the end, quietly converts a water utility into a bank.
The Bank of the Manhattan Company opens within months, before they've laid much pipe, specifically to break the Federalist lock on New York banking that Hamilton's Bank of New York held. Hamilton, who'd been used as the respectable front for the water pitch, cut ties when he understood what he'd waved through. Which, you can see his point.
The water system they actually built was garbage on purpose. Hollowed-out pine logs for pipes. A network serving maybe a thousand houses. Water nobody wanted to drink. Doing it well would've cost the bank money, and the charter only required that they attempt to supply water — so they attempted. (This is, I think, one of the purest documents of the whole American arrangement: the legally-mandated gesture toward the public good, executed at exactly the minimum that keeps the charter, while the actual machine does something else entirely in the back.)
That bank is the direct corporate ancestor of JPMorgan Chase. The company that did the worst possible job supplying water to a dying city is now the biggest bank in America.
Now put the murder on top of it. In late 1799 a 22-year-old Quaker woman named Elma Sands turns up dead at the bottom of a well off what's now Spring Street — and the well belongs to the Manhattan Company. Burr's water-company-shaped bank. His infrastructure.
Her accused killer is a carpenter named Levi Weeks who boarded in the same house, and he gets defended by — who else — Hamilton and Burr, co-counsel, plus Brockholst Livingston, a future Supreme Court justice. The "dream team," and the reason it assembled is completely unglamorous: Levi's brother Ezra was a rich builder who'd built Hamilton's country house, the Grange, and had the money and the leverage.
A rich guy needed to bail his little brother out.
So Burr is connected to this one dead girl three separate ways at once. He owns the well she's found in. He's on the defense team for the man accused of putting her there. And he was professional colleagues with the brother of the accused.
The trial gives us the candle moment — both Hamilton and Burr later took credit for it, and the actual transcript credits it only to "one of the prisoner's counsel" — where a candle gets held up to a different suspect's face in the dark courtroom so the jury can read his guilt off his features.
(The defense's case was largely built around naming all the men Elma could have been "going with" so as to leave doubt it was Levi. A strategy we're still familiar with 250 years later.)
Jury acquits in about five minutes.
You see how dense this is? Collaborate on a celebrity murder defense over a body in your own bank's well, tie for the presidency the same year, then kill the man you collaborated with on a ledge in Weehawken four years on.
(There's a curse attached to the whole thing, and it's folklore, stitched together in hindsight, but it's good folklore. When the verdict came in, legend has Elma's aunt Catherine Ring rounding on the defense and cursing them — in the best-attested version, shaking her fist at Hamilton and saying that if he died a natural death she'd believe there was no justice in heaven. And then you look at what happened to the men in that courtroom. Hamilton: shot dead by his own co-counsel four years later. Hamilton's son Philip: killed in a duel on the same Weehawken ground, three years before his father. Brockholst Livingston, the third defense lawyer: also killed a man in a duel, and was said to live under a gloom he never shook (though they made him a Supreme Court justice anyway). Burr: the duel, the treason trial, exile, ruin, his daughter lost at sea — the slowest and most total unraveling of the lot. And the presiding judge, Chief Justice John Lansing Jr., walked out of a Manhattan hotel in December 1829 to post a letter and was never seen again, no body, no trace, ten days short of exactly thirty years after Elma Sands left her boardinghouse and vanished the same way. The man who presided over the trial of a girl who disappeared, disappeared. Which proves nothing — people in that era dueled and met bad ends at a clip, and you can assemble a "curse" out of any unlucky enough crowd if you squint — but the Lansing detail in particular is real, unsolved, and sits there refusing to be explained, same as the rest of it.)
The same two names keep coming out of the same hat, in the same small city, over and over, until one of them is dead.
Right, the tie. 1800. Everybody knows the cartoon version from the musical now, but the actual mechanism is the whole point, because it's the old system breaking against the new one in real time. The Constitution at that point had each elector casting two undifferentiated votes for president, no way to mark one for president and one for VP — a design that assumed electors were discrete agents of quality exercising individual judgment, the 18th-century model. But mass parties had just shown up, the electors were now party agents pledged to a ticket, and when the Democratic-Republican machine delivered cleanly for Jefferson-and-Burr, the two men tied, seventy-three to seventy-three, and it went to the House.
And here's the weird part, the diagnostic part. Burr, who everyone understood was running for the second slot, did not stand down. He didn't openly grab for the top job either. He just went quiet and let it ride.
Let the House grind through thirty-six ballots over seven days while the Federalists schemed to install him over Jefferson specifically to spite Jefferson. And his silence during that stretch did more lasting damage to him inside his own party than the duel or the treason ever did, because — and this is the thing — Burr was behaving exactly as the old system said you should.
Of course you don't refuse a chance at the presidency that the machinery has handed you. Offices are positions you acquire through maneuver. That's the game. He was playing it correctly. It's just that the game had changed under him into something where pledged loyalty to the ticket was now the whole moral content, and operating like the old rules still held read, to everyone watching, as naked treachery.
The man who broke the tie against him, who threw his weight to Jefferson, was Hamilton.
And you have to understand why Hamilton did it, because it's the duel in miniature. Hamilton was an ideological animal. He had a program — centralized finance, manufacturing, a strong executive, an Anglophile foreign policy — and he believed in it like scripture. What he could not stand about Burr was that Burr appeared to have no program at all. No fixed commitments. A man you could deal with. Which to Hamilton meant a man without principle, which to Hamilton meant the single most dangerous kind of politician, because a man who could end up anywhere will. Better Jefferson, whose principles Hamilton hated but could at least locate.
And from inside Burr's head this was just incomprehensible. Of course you could deal with him — that's how politics worked. The alternative was what, ideological warfare? The kind of factional bloodletting that had wrecked every previous republic on the historical record? Hamilton's principled loathing landed on Burr as personal loathing, because in Burr's framework there was no other kind of loathing available. There was no "I oppose your structural vision of the state." There were just men, and whether you could do business with them.
(The Twelfth Amendment, ratified 1804, exists to make sure that particular tie can never recur. It's a constitutional patch named, in effect, after this one specific mess. They had to rewire the machine because Burr almost drove through a seam in it.)
As VP he presided over the Senate and the lasting thing he did there was procedural — the body of rules and chair-precedents he shaped feed into the lineage that eventually produces the filibuster, the minority's power to talk a thing to death. People say "Burr invented the filibuster," which overstates it, but the Senate's tolerance for unlimited debate has roots in this rulebook, sure.
Then the duel, which I won't relitigate end to end, just the texture. 1804. He loses the New York governor's race. Some remarks Hamilton made about him at a dinner — a "despicable opinion," per the letter that got printed — make it into the papers, Burr demands an apology or a denial, Hamilton supplies neither, and the sitting Vice President of the United States shoots and kills the former Secretary of the Treasury on a ledge across the river in Weehawken.
A sitting VP commits homicide and then just… finishes his term.
Indicted in both New Jersey and New York, neither prosecution goes anywhere, and he gavels the Senate to order for months afterward like nothing happened. Which, again — old system. Affairs of honor between gentlemen were a recognized institution. He was, in his own framework, behaving correctly. The framework was three years from being a relic.
And NOW we get to the part everyone treats as Burr losing his mind, the Western thing, which I'd argue is the opposite of losing his mind. It's Burr correctly reading that his Eastern career is finished and rationally applying the only model he's got to the one venue where it might still work.
Because here's the question that the whole essay is really about: how does a guy in 1805 look around and conclude that he can just go start a country? And the answer is that in 1805 this was not actually a crazy thing to conclude.
Think about what the trans-Mississippi West was. It's the last place on the continent where the old colonial-era playbook — raise a private army on personal credit and loyalty, march into contested ground, carve out a polity on individual initiative, present the established powers with a fait accompli — could plausibly still be run. People had been doing exactly this for two hundred years. It's what the proprietors did. It's what every colonial adventurer with a land grant and a militia did. And it's not even past its time — Andrew Jackson is about to do a version of it successfully in Spanish Florida, invading foreign territory more or less on his own hook and getting rewarded for it. The filibusters — and I mean the OTHER filibuster, the freebooting private-army-into-Latin-America guys, not the Senate kind — are going to run this exact move for the next fifty years, William Walker crowning himself president of Nicaragua and all that. Burr wasn't hallucinating a possibility. He was reaching for a real and recently-live one.
He went west and started assembling — something.
Nobody has ever fully established what. Peel the western states off into a separate confederacy? Raise a private army and invade Spanish Mexico and crown himself emperor of it? A giant land-speculation con dressed up as both to keep the money flowing? Possibly all three at once, the pitch shifting depending on which backer he had in the room that day — and that ambiguity is itself old-system, because in the personalist mode you don't need a fixed program, you need momentum and men and possibility, and you sort out what it actually is once you've got the force assembled.
His private army topped out at fewer than a hundred men. He sent a feeler to the British minister offering, essentially, to detach a chunk of North America for them. Britain didn't bite.
His chief co-conspirator was General James Wilkinson — ranking officer in the entire U.S. Army — and the thing about Wilkinson, which comes out later, is that he was simultaneously a paid agent of the Spanish crown the whole time, known in the Spanish files as Agent 13. When Wilkinson decided the scheme was going to fail he turned on Burr, sent Jefferson a letter Burr had written him in cipher, and — this is the good part — doctored the cipher letter first to scrub his own involvement before turning it in as evidence.
The chief witness for the prosecution was a foreign double agent who had personally edited the prosecution's central document. You cannot make this up.
The staging ground was an island in the Ohio River owned by Harman Blennerhassett, a wealthy dreamy Irish émigré who'd built a mansion in the middle of the river, got swept into Burr's orbit, bankrolled a chunk of the operation, and lost basically everything for it. (There's always a Blennerhassett. The personalist-adventure model runs on finding the rich romantic who'll fund the dream and eat the loss.)
Jefferson wanted Burr hanged and said so more or less publicly, which gave you the spectacle of a sitting President pre-judging a capital trial. And the trial itself is maybe the single most beautiful artifact of the whole transition I'm describing, because the man presiding was Chief Justice John Marshall, and what Marshall did was basically rule the old definition of treason out of existence.
The old definition was political: treason is whatever looks like plotting against the established order, broadly, by feel.
Marshall read the Constitution's clause narrowly — "levying war" requires an actual overt act of assembled force, witnessed by two people — and since Burr hadn't physically been on the island when the handful of men gathered there, the only provable overt act had no Burr in it.
The jury returned one of the great passive-aggressive verdicts in American law: not "not guilty" but "not proved to be guilty by any evidence submitted to us." Marshall's ruling is still the reason treason convictions are nearly impossible to get in this country, and it's good law, the legalistic-procedural standard is the modern one and the right one — but in 1807 the distinction between "a legal standard" and "a political favor to a man Jefferson hated" was still being invented, and to half the country it read as Marshall springing an enemy of the President on a technicality.
Burr beat the rap on what's fundamentally a definitional point, and his reputation never recovered anyway, because the country had already convicted him in the venue that was actually replacing the courts and the salons: the newspapers. Public opinion as an independent force. The new machine.
So he runs to Europe, broke and disgraced, for four years, and this is where it gets, in a quiet way, the weirdest, because of the diary.
He kept a private journal the whole exile, ostensibly for his daughter, and it survived, and it got published in 1838 after his death, and it is an astonishing document. He recorded his sex life in it with what one writer called lawyerly precision — affairs with aristocratic women, paid encounters everywhere from the parks of Stockholm to the arcades of the Palais Royal, a running ledger of it, a lot of it with maids and governesses bolstering thin salaries, which a modern reader accurately called the gig economy before it had a name.
And he switched languages mid-sentence to cover his tracks — English to French specifically when the subject turned to sex, dropping into Latin and bits of Swedish and German — partly habit, partly to baffle a nosy London landlady he correctly figured was reading his pages.
The diary's also full of him being broke in the smallest, most human ways.
He logs his purchases. There's a much-passed-around bit about him recording the price of a single coconut that works out, inflation-adjusted, to something absurd. (I couldn't run the exact figure to ground against the primary text, so take "absurd" as the claim, not a number.) He pawned things. He records fits of pique — once driving a fifteen-year-old street musician out of his room and then immediately regretting it and spending the whole rest of the day looking for her to apologize.
And while he's in this state — destitute, surveilled, writing filth in four languages to dodge his landlady — he's also hanging around Jeremy Bentham. The founder of utilitarianism. The felicific-calculus guy. And the two of them at one point sit together gazing at a portrait of Theodosia, his daughter, of whom Bentham was a long-distance admirer. The man who shot Hamilton and tried to invade Mexico, sitting in a London room with the greatest-happiness-of-the-greatest-number guy, mooning over a picture of the kid he educated like a prince. That happened.
Which — the daughter. I should back up to the daughter, because Theodosia is the one place the personalist 18th-century man did something that reads as ahead of his time rather than behind it.
Burr decided, on principle, partly off reading Mary Wollstonecraft, to educate his daughter exactly the way you'd educate a brilliant son. Greek, Latin, mathematics, the works.
She became one of the most learned women in the country. He adored her past the point of sense, and she adored him back through every disgrace — the duel, the treason, all of it.
And then she vanished. After her ten-year-old son died of fever in 1812 she fell into a deep decline, and that December she boarded a schooner called the Patriot at Georgetown, South Carolina, to sail up to New York and see her father, who'd just crept back from exile. The ship was never seen again. Neither was she.
It generated two centuries of pulp — storm theories, pirate theories, aged convicts giving deathbed confessions to having boarded and scuttled the Patriot and walked the passengers off a plank, a mystery portrait of an unnamed woman that surfaced through a North Carolina fisherman's wife and got pinned to the legend. Burr believed, simply, that she'd drowned. He outlived her by more than twenty years.
He came home in 1812 under his mother's family name, Edwards, to dodge his creditors — which is its own quiet joke, hiding from his debts behind the surname of the most famous Puritan in America.
Rebuilt a law practice. New Yorkers were startled to find they'd actually hire the guy.
And then the children, because the relentless-with-women thing had consequences scattered across decades. He was an unmarried adult for forty straight years, late thirties to seventy-seven, and the result is a fog of probable and acknowledged illegitimate kids.
In old age he openly raised two young men in his household — Aaron Columbus Burr, a goldsmith brought over from France with a cover story about being some count's son, and Charles Burdett — both widely understood to be his. There's a persistent never-proven rumor, recorded in John Quincy Adams's own diary, that Martin Van Buren, the future president, was Burr's son, mostly on the strength of the two being short, vain, dapper, and politically slippery in the same way.
And then, confirmed by DNA only in 2019, there's the part nobody talked about: Burr fathered two children — including the Philadelphia abolitionist and Underground Railroad organizer John Pierre Burr — with Mary Emmons, a Haitian (possibly Bengali-born) governess in his household, while his first wife was dying of cancer.
For two centuries John Pierre Burr was "the natural son" in the genealogies. The descendants got his headstone changed to read, simply, "son."
(There's also the Jacataqua story — that on the Quebec march, at a riverside feast at Fort Western, the teenage Burr took up with a young Abenaki sachem's daughter, that they shot the bears for the barbecue and hauled a cub back to camp on a leash, that she bore him a child. Almost certainly more folklore than fact. But it attached to him because it fit, and what fits a man is its own kind of evidence about him.)
Then the last weird thing, the bookend. At seventy-seven, in 1833, Burr married Eliza Jumel, at that point the wealthiest woman in New York. And her backstory rivals his beat for beat: born in a Providence workhouse to a prostitute mother, possibly convinced she was George Washington's secret daughter, reinvented as an actress, became a French wine merchant's mistress and then — by faking a deathbed illness so her dying wish could be the wedding — his wife, then inherited his entire fortune when he died falling off a hay wagon onto his own pitchfork.
She married Burr to climb socially. He married her, everyone agrees, to get at her money.
He blew through her liquid assets on land speculation almost immediately, because of course he did, the old land-adventurer reflex one more time, in a body that couldn't run it anymore. She separated from him within months and sued for divorce on grounds of adultery — at seventy-seven, the adultery charge stuck, which is its own kind of testament. And the lawyer she hired to grind him through the courts was Alexander Hamilton Jr. The son of the man Burr had shot dead thirty years before.
The divorce was finalized on September 14, 1836. That is the day Aaron Burr died, bedridden from strokes, on Staten Island. The papers dissolving the marriage went through on the morning he stopped breathing. The son of the man he'd killed signed off on the last humiliation of his life on the same day the life ended.
He's buried in Princeton, at the feet of his father the college president and his grandfather the great theologian. The orphan returned to the two graves he'd started out lying next to.
And the punchline of the whole thing, the reason he's worth all these words, is that the Jacksonian moment that arrives right after he dies is in some ways a return to personalist politics — the charismatic individual, the loyalty, the faction — except built on a completely different base, mass democratic mobilization instead of elite deal-craft. And Burr would've been useless at it. He was charming to peers, not to crowds. He could work a room of twelve men of quality and not a square full of voters.
So here's what he actually was, under all the anecdotes: a perfectly competent operator of a game that stopped being played. The skill was real. The intelligence was real. The instincts were real for the world he came up in. He's an evolutionary dead-end, the last clean specimen of a political type the American republic decided in its first thirty years that it didn't want and couldn't afford — and the fact that the republic was right to decide that doesn't make the specimen any less interesting to stand over and look at.
Hamilton got martyred at exactly the right moment, before his own vision had to survive contact with the Jacksonian democracy that would've humiliated it.
Burr lived another thirty-two years and got to watch.
Today's post was exceptionally long because that's the life Burr led. So I decided this was a good opportunity to leave the bibliography in, since a) already long and b) readers might be particularly suspicious at this many things.
FACT STATUS (full standalone record — every load-bearing claim and its status, so this file is self-contained):
Verified via web search this session against: encyclopedia.com / jrank (Levi Weeks trial), Historical Society of the NY Courts (People v. Weeks), Statutes and Stories (Weeks aftermath, parts 1-3), Murder by Gaslight, erenow.org reproduction of Chernow's Alexander Hamilton ch. 37, BackStory radio, Founders Online (Hamilton-Ezra Weeks accounts), Wikipedia (Levi Weeks, Eliza Jumel, John Lansing Jr., Manhattan Company), mental_floss, Bowery Boys, The American Scholar (Burr's European journal), fairweatherlewis and Strange Company blogs (Lansing disappearance). I did NOT read Coleman's full 1800 trial transcript or Burr's published journal line-by-line; transcript/journal specifics are as quoted by the secondary literature.
- All load-bearing claims verified: pedigree (Edwards/Burr Sr./Princeton), orphaning, Princeton 13->16, Quebec march + Montgomery's body, two-week Washington staff stint + Putnam + Long Island brigade, Manhattan Company (Collect Pond/yellow fever, the smuggled surplus-capital clause, pine-log pipes, ~1000 houses, JPMorgan lineage, Hamilton cutting ties), Elma Sands (well ownership, dream-team defense via Ezra/Grange leverage, candle moment credited only to "one of the prisoner's counsel," ~5-min acquittal), 1800 tie (73-73, 36 ballots, Hamilton breaks it for Jefferson, 12th Amendment), filibuster-rules connection (hedged), duel (1804, NY governor's race, Cooper "despicable opinion" letter, Weehawken, indicted both states, finished term), treason (vague aims genuinely unresolved by historians, <100 men, British feeler, Wilkinson = Army's ranking officer AND Spanish Agent 13 who doctored the cipher letter, Blennerhassett, Jefferson wanting him hanged, Marshall's narrow overt-act ruling, "not proved to be guilty" verdict, subpoena/executive-privilege), exile + journal (1838, Davis ed., explicit sexual ledger, language-switching to evade the landlady), Bentham + Theodosia portrait, Theodosia (Wollstonecraft education, Patriot vanished Dec 1812, pulp afterlife), "Edwards" alias for creditors, children (Aaron Columbus Burr, Charles Burdett, Van Buren rumor in JQA's diary, John Pierre Burr + sibling by Mary Emmons confirmed by DNA 2019, headstone changed to "son"), Jacataqua (flagged folklore), Eliza Jumel (workhouse/prostitute-mother origin, Washington-daughter delusion, actress, faked-illness marriage to Stephen Jumel, hay-wagon/pitchfork death, wealthiest woman in NY, married Burr 1833 at 77, blew her money on land speculation, adultery divorce, lawyer Alexander Hamilton Jr., finalized Sept 14 1836 = day Burr died on Staten Island), Princeton burial beside father and grandfather.
STILL SOFT (hedged in-text, flag for your own check if you want to keep):
The $40 coconut figure — sourced only from listicle-tier pages citing the journal; I wrote "something absurd" and explicitly noted I couldn't run the exact number to ground.
Priest-disguise leg to Montreal — well-circulated, not ironclad; hedged in-text.
The street-musician regret anecdote — from a journal-quoting reviewer; matches the journal's tenor but thinly sourced.
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