Tyson Reeder is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. This interview is based on his new book, Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison’s America (Oxford University Press, 2024).
JF: What led you to write Serpent in Eden?
TR: I began writing Serpent in Eden in 2019. For the prior three years, discussions about foreign meddling and foreign collusion inundated US political conversations. Those culminated with the first impeachment of President Donald Trump, who was accused of working with foreign agents and misusing public funds to procure criminal dirt on his political opposition. At the time, I was an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, where I was an editor of the Papers of James Madison, specializing in Madison’s time as secretary of state. Time after time, I saw this fear of foreign meddling crop up in Madison’s writing, and he commented on the problem in terms very relevant to the political conversations in 2019. I didn’t initially intend to write a book meant to speak so directly to current politics, but the problem of foreign meddling and internal division was so pervasive in Madison’s writings, I just couldn’t ignore it. The more I learned about the historical roots of the problem, and the more I listened to scholars and the public appeal to the founding generation to conceptualize the problem, the more I realized we were working with insufficient and overly simplistic information. I thought, “Somebody needs to write a book about this.” And then it dawned on me that I was probably the person to do it.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of Serpent in Eden?
TR: During the early republic, Americans faced a calamitous cycle—I call it a “destructive symbiosis”—between foreign meddling and partisan politics. Foreign powers meddled in US politics; US partisans accused each other of colluding with foreign powers; those accusations deepened party animosity; that animosity made it easier for foreign powers to meddle in US politics.
JF: Why do we need to read Serpent in Eden?
TR: First, readers will find incredible, entertaining stories about fascinating (and sometimes infuriating) people—French con artist Paul Émile Soubiran, American double agent James Wilkinson, British secret agent George Beckwith, Creek leader Alexander McGillivray, and many more. They’ll also learn about Madison’s own troubled relationship with foreign meddling and partisan politics. On a deeper level, historical parallels lend vital perspective on current problems. It’s easier to study the past in objective and nuanced terms than it is our present, so if we can find a historical parallel that we can study with some emotional distance, it’s easier to see more clearly our present. By uncovering the pitfalls of foreign meddling and partisan politics, Serpent in Eden offers both a warning and hope about our current political moment. The book’s main goal is to diagnose a historical problem rather than prescribe a political solution, but I wanted to leave the reader with something more than a sense of fatalism about the problem. So it concludes with helpful and hopeful insight about how Americans may break the destructive cycle of foreign meddling and partisanship.
JF: Why and when did you become an American historian?
TR: Mr. Anderson’s fifth grade class, reinforced by Mrs. Obray’s AP US History class. There’s something in the elusiveness of the past that makes it alluring. We often know just enough that we feel like we can reach out and touch it, but it soon reminds us of its evanescence. The past only exists in the imagination. Though I ground my writing in evidence and facts and data, studying history is always an act of imagination—not fiction, as some postmodernists claim, but imagination, certainly. I feel like I know James Madison; I can see him sitting in his upper floor study at Monticello poring over history and constitutional philosophy while he tries to sort through the problem of foreign intrusion and political division. In the end, though, the image is ethereal. That’s what makes studying it so fascinating.
JF: What is your next project?
TR: My next project will examine the origins of American executive power, tracing a long history from the English Civil Wars, particular focus on the Revolutionary period, and extending into the early republic. As with Serpent in Eden, my idea for the book came more organically than just scanning headlines and trying to write a relevant history book. In fact, I woke up from a dream with the book title (which I’m not ready to share yet) in my head before I even thought of the subject of the book. But certainly, recent news cycles about executive power in the United States have fired my imagination about this project.
JF: Thanks, Tyson!