These were my father’s books; they were not meant for me. But their paperback covers, with images of strapping men waging war and gorgeous couples waging you-know-what, held great allure for a shy boy versed in neither of those life skills. So, one day — I must have been around 13 — I pulled the first novel in the series off the shelf.
It was “The Bastard,” by John Jakes.
Almost immediately, I was captivated. In part for the naughty bits, sure. But that first book and the ones that followed — “The Rebels,” “The Seekers,” “The Furies,” “The Titans,” “The Warriors,” “The Lawless” and, finally, “The Americans” — also offered me a romanticized and tantalizing history of the United States, one that appealed to my sense of adventure, of right and wrong, of longing for a country that was not yet mine.
I had no idea then, as I read the books in the mid-1980s, that Jakes’s eight-volume, multigenerational saga about the Kents, an American family whose lives span the Revolutionary era to the late 19th century, had been a sensation in the United States just a few years earlier. Published between 1974 and 1979 to mark the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Jakes’s American Bicentennial Series was wildly popular, even spawning tacky television versions (imagine William Shatner and Kim Cattrall in Colonial garb). Together, the books would sell 55 million copies. My family emigrated from Peru to the United States in the mid-1970s, just in time for my father to join the Jakes craze.
It’s easy to see why Americans embraced this story. The Kents are dashing and brave and principled and passionate, pausing their honorable fighting and copious copulating to ponder big ideas about duty and nation, and to wrestle with the choices brought on by the wealth and influence the family amasses. Their motto — “take a stand and make a mark” — has a whiff of noblesse oblige to it, but why not? For a country emerging from the self-doubt of Vietnam and the shame of Watergate, some celebratory historical fiction must have been a comforting way to blow out 200 candles.
A year from now, the United States will reach another big anniversary of independence. Intense debates have already begun over how we should mark America’s 250th — what history will be told, which heroes will be honored, whether celebration or introspection should have pride of place, how to commemorate the founding at a moment when our foundations are under stress.
In search of answers, I decided to try Jakes and the Kents once more. I wanted to see if the books that inspired so many Americans 50 years ago could offer some help for another apprehensive age. And selfishly, I wanted to relive the Kent story, some 5,000 pages worth, to see whether my old fascination endured.
In a 1982 interview, Jakes, who died in 2023 at age 90, explained the responsibility he felt toward his fans. “I began to realize about two or three books into the Kent series that I was the only source of history that some of these people had ever had,” he said.
I can’t speak for other readers, but he was right about me. By the time I began poring over his books, my family had returned to Peru, where I completed middle school and high school. From afar, the Kent family became my earliest guide to the American story.
As I grew older, went to college in the United States and made this place home, my understanding of the country evolved and, I hope, matured. Yet there was something about the Jakes books that still beckoned.
The Kents embodied the stories America likes to tell about itself: every ideal we’ve claimed about liberty and self-government, every motto we’ve echoed about opportunity and equality. I think this is why the books were so compelling to me for so long; they validated the notion of America as an idea. A worthwhile one.
Now, reading them so many years later, I find a corollary to that story. On its own, the American idea gets you only partial credit. America is also a choice. A hard one.
For the Kents, success is achievable but also arduous and frail; their American dream demands many sleepless nights. The frontier calls to them, but they explore it as much out of desperation as ambition. America is a nation of immigrants, but while the Kents embrace newcomers, they abuse them, too.
America is the land of the free, but when it keeps people in bondage, the family agonizes before doing the right thing. And though all Americans are created equal, there are men of means and guile who remain above the law and above the rest. The Kents despise them but are also tempted to join them.
They confront these choices throughout individual lives and across generations. Their choice for America is between status and duty, expediency and principle, an easy existence and a meaningful one. The Kents’ story remains memorable for many reasons, but it remains necessary because its protagonists understand that American ideals aren’t simply what we profess to believe, but how we choose to live, and the price we are willing to pay for those choices.
Part of what I loved about the Kents as a kid was their ubiquity. At so many moments in the national story, there they are, and they manage to meet just about every major figure in the country’s history. The Kents don’t just live in America; they seem to be America.
Philip Kent is the patriarch, the French-born bastard of “The Bastard.” The secret, illegitimate son of a British duke and a Parisian actress, Philip crosses the Atlantic and proceeds to toss tea into Boston Harbor, fire his musket upon the redcoats at Concord and weather the freeze at Valley Forge. His descendants fight at Fallen Timbers, sail aboard Old Ironsides, survive the Alamo, pan for gold near Sutter’s Mill, smuggle Virginia slaves to freedom, defend a Georgia plantation from Sherman’s onslaught, survive the great Chicago fire, endure the Johnstown flood, join the labor movement and defend the rights of women and immigrants. “A passion for causes runs in the family,” one of Philip’s great-grandsons explains. It runs through the country, too.
But part of what I love about the Kents when I read the books now is how deeply this family values the written word. Publishing is their primary occupation, and the power of words is inseparable from the actions they take, from the America Jakes describes.
That story begins with a teenage Philip Kent (then named Phillipe Charboneau), still living in France and taking English lessons in preparation to claim the sizable inheritance that his British nobleman father has promised him. The pledge came in a formal letter the duke had sent Philip’s mother years earlier, a document she guarded with her life.
Philip never comes into the money — when the duke falls ill and Philip travels to England, his relatives there try to have him killed — but his real riches came through those language lessons. His tutor had slipped him tracts by major thinkers of the age: Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau. Those writings propel Philip’s political awakening, his belief in a coming confrontation between the common people and those who seek to rule them, aristocrats like his own British relatives.
So, Philip gives up the quest for inherited riches and escapes to the Colonies, which were already reveling in insurgent fervor. Danger pushes Philip to America, but ideas pull him there.
In Boston, he finds work in an independence-minded publishing house where he bonds with luminaries of the Revolutionary era. Philip gets buzzed with Ben Franklin, gets a tooth replaced by Paul Revere and gets lectured by Sam Adams, who reminds him that “no man can remain neutral in the coming struggle.” Years later, Philip would open his own printing firm, Kent and Son. Among the first volumes he publishes is an elegant edition of Thomas Paine’s “American Crisis” essays, which he had encountered as a soldier in the Continental Army. In the Kents’ America, action and ideas are never far apart.
Control over Kent and Son — and of the abolitionist newspaper the Kents start later, The New York Union — becomes a constant preoccupation within the family, not just because of the income it provides, but also because of the contributions the business makes to the emerging nation. One of Philip’s sons recalls how his father became a publisher “to make money, to be sure — but also because he believed the printing trade is of inestimable value to mankind.”
When I first read these books, I paid little attention to the family business; the Kents may as well have been blacksmiths instead of wordsmiths. Now I know that they could have been nothing other than writers and publishers, devoted to inquiry. In a country forever reconsidering its story, they were the ones producing new editions.
That “inestimable value” of words and writers comes up repeatedly. One Kent dines with Samuel Clemens; another stands with Walt Whitman as a bar brawl looks to break out. On the eve of the Civil War, a Kent interviews Abraham Lincoln for the Union newspaper, and the president discusses the influence on the nation of books such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe and “The Impending Crisis of the South” by Hinton Helper. “They always say it’s the politicians who cause trouble for common folk,” Lincoln muses, “but I sometimes wonder if it isn’t our authors who set off the firecrackers first.”
When the country approached its 1876 centennial, Gideon Kent, Philip’s great-great-grandson and a Confederate cavalry officer turned rail yard organizer turned New York publisher, decides to honor the moment with a book titled “100 Years.” It is meant to convey the American experience since Philip’s days — revolution and expansion, slavery and civil war, agriculture and industry. Gideon asks his younger brother, an artist, to travel the country and sketch illustrations for the book, but the brother is initially skeptical. “Patriotic twaddle,” he scoffs. “Or commercialism inspired by the American centennial.”
Reading this passage now, I wondered if Jakes was winking at fans of his own bicentennial project. But I suspect he agreed with Gideon, who hopes that “100 Years” might counter the fear and cynicism he saw in America. “Can a mere book do that?” Gideon asks. “Yes, I think so.”
Hiding out in London and on the run from his murderous British family, Philip starts to fantasize about the American colonies, a place, as Franklin told him, where a man could “rise as far and as fast as his wit and industry permit.” Inheriting his father’s wealth now seemed unrealistic and hollow. Philip had a better plan, Jakes writes. “Or should it be termed a dream?”
This is the first allusion in these books — a tad obvious, perhaps — to the American dream. Philip’s mother derides his “foolish dream” of crossing the Atlantic, but soon he is going to sleep murmuring the word “America.” On the voyage over, he anglicizes his name, laying Phillipe Charboneau to rest and christening himself Philip Kent.
Multiple generations of Kents pursue that American dream, longing for riches and respectability. Thanks to wit, industry and a good bit of luck, Philip achieves it, but by the third generation, the mismanaged publishing firm has fallen into the hands of a conniving rival. The family loses everything and is even exiled from Boston.
When their American dream proves fragile, the Kents do what Americans always do (or always used to do). They move.
One Kent goes west for the harsh life of homesteading; another ekes out a living as a trapper and miner. Neither finds much joy, but they keep trying. “What was America if not the eternal promise of beginning again?” Jakes asks. He chronicles how “the seekers of escape and the seekers of dreams poured forth from the east,” changing their lives and transforming their country. The scattering of the Kent family — south to Virginia and Texas, west to California, with many stops in between — reflects the expansionist, violent and unrelenting impulses of the young nation, a destiny that Americans are tempted to interpret as exceptional.
“We are gaining new territory all the time,” one of the Kents reflects three decades after independence. “The pace of invention and technical progress is astounding. The United States can expand, and prosper. Despite greed and faulty thinking and all the cruelties and aberrations of the human condition, this nation can become something unlike any other state or kingdom in the world’s history.”
Amanda Kent, Philip’s granddaughter and just a child when her family loses its stature, becomes the agent of its restoration, perhaps the most ruthless and single-minded of the Kents. Impossibly gorgeous and resourceful, ready with a quip and handy with a revolver, Amanda leads an itinerant life — managing a Texas brothel, tending bar in a California mining town — but all along vows to return to Boston and re-establish the Kent name.
Her goal becomes an obsession, an American dream that mixes ambition with vengeance. She convinces herself that the family’s prior wealth is her birthright, that anything done to reclaim it is justified. Amanda Kent is America at its most self-righteous and predatory, beautiful and terrifying at once.
She is especially fixated on recovering some heirlooms left behind in Boston, mementos of the battles Philip and his descendants had fought. They include a splendid French sword, a gift to Philip by a young Marquis de Lafayette (of course). A Kentucky rifle, which Philip had acquired while in the Continental Army. A splinter of wood torn from the frigate the U.S.S. Constitution, where Philip’s grandson had served during its victory over the H.M.S. Guerriere. And a green printer’s bottle in which Philip had saved some tea from Adams’s tea party.
These items are touchstones for generations of Kents. “I want to share with you the reverence I have for these objects, because they are the sum and symbol of the way your grandfather pledged his life to what he believed,” Amanda once heard her father explain. “Many men — and women — pledge themselves to nothing but their own self-interest. That’s not the Kent way.” No Kent should ever forget those objects: “Guard them as you would your own life.”
Amanda finally succeeds, the printing house back in family hands, the heirlooms again in the Kents’ possession. But her unremitting pursuit of happiness ends up costing Amanda her life. It also warps her only son, who absorbs Amanda’s pitiless ambition but not her sense of responsibility. As a boy, he rapes an Irish servant girl, and in the early days of the Civil War, he attempts to do business clandestinely with both North and South, a scheme that sunders the family once more, just like the nation had been torn.
The American dream is tantalizing but dangerous. The Kents awaken from it again and again.
The cross-country expansion that the Kents lived out soon slammed up against the national fight of the mid-19th century: whether slavery would grow along with the nation, and whether America could withstand the contradictions between creed and practice. The Civil War takes up two books in Jakes’s series — three Kents fought for the South, one for the North — but it bleeds into subsequent volumes, never truly over. (In the 1980s, Jakes would publish a best-selling “North and South” trilogy on the war, portrayed on the small screen by Patrick Swayze and Kirstie Alley.)
As a boy, I skimmed the passages devoted to Jephtha Kent, a Methodist preacher in Virginia and Philip’s great-grandson; now, they feel crucial to understanding the fate of both family and country. Jephtha sees his church split over slavery, and at first remains ambivalent. “I am not sure of my own heart,” he writes in his journal. As he grows sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, he stays silent, fearing the wrath of his devotedly Southern wife and her slave-owning father. “If there is to be peace in our household,” he confesses, “I dare not speak what is in my soul.”
But after his father-in-law murders a runaway slave, Jephtha decides that “the Almighty has finally decreed that I shall keep silent no longer.” From the pulpit, he speaks out against slavery and soon becomes a pariah to church and family. Even his three young sons are made to turn against him. “I am conscience made visible,” he concludes. “A pricking thorn.”
When Jephtha helps send Mary, a girl enslaved by his father-in-law, to Boston, and urges his cousin Amanda to help smuggle her to Canada, he forces a choice on the Northern side of the family, too. Amanda, focused on restoring the family fortune, prefers to abstain from the question cleaving the country. But once again, neutrality in this American struggle has become impossible.
Amanda meets Frederick Douglass and attends a speech in which he assails the Fugitive Slave Act. (This is some months before Douglass’s famous “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” speech of 1852, and it covers similar themes.) She tells Douglass that she sympathizes, but that for now, the law is the law. “I think you’d change your mind if you were face to face with one of the law’s victims,” Douglass responds. Thanks to Jephtha, she suddenly is.
Taking a stand on slavery risks Amanda’s dream of buying the family’s old publishing firm (the new owners had Southern sympathies). Amanda asks herself if helping Mary was worth the cost. “Foolish question,” she decides. “In that kind of situation, a Kent could never refuse. But the price of Mary’s safety was so high; so unbearably high.” It would be higher than just risking Kent and Son. The slave owner comes north hunting for his property, and a mob attacks Amanda’s house. Mary makes it to freedom, but Amanda is fatally wounded defending her home and the family heirlooms she so treasures.
On several occasions, characters in these books quote the same passage from Thomas Paine’s 1776 “Common Sense” pamphlet: “Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods, and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”
The Kents consistently pay a high price for freedom. When Philip loses his wife during the Revolutionary War — she is abducted and killed by a lecherous sea captain while Philip is serving loyally in Washington’s army — he returns home heartbroken and soon considers giving up on his fledgling printing shop. But his friend Lafayette throws the book of Paine essays at Philip’s feet. “You print them in hope of a profit, yet you’re blind to the very words on the page! Mr. Paine knows heaven sets the proper price on its goods. In your miserable self-pity, you have forgotten!”
Foundational beliefs are easy when times are good. It is in suffering, the Kents realize, that principle becomes more vital, its proper price unbearably high.
When I read these books decades ago, I thought of them as the story of a family against the hazy backdrop of U.S. history. Now, I see America’s story in the foreground, with a singular family as the means to convey it.
Jakes is not subtle with his symbolism. If America gained independence from Britain, Philip thinks, “she would be, in a sense, what he had been from the beginning: a bastard child thrust into a dangerous world alone.” Philip’s friendship with Lafayette represents the alliance with France in the Revolutionary era. When Philip’s grandson flees Boston in disgrace and worries he may be the last surviving Kent, he reminds himself that “he has it in his power to begin the family anew.” It is an echo of Paine’s “Common Sense,” which declared that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” And when the family is broken by the Civil War, Gideon Kent recalls the words of St. Mark, and of Lincoln — that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Gideon is thinking of his family, but he wonders if “perhaps it was true of America,” too.
No doubt, the Kents lapse into sanctimony and self-regard, and their relentless heroism sidelines other important participants in the American narrative, rendering them as little more than victims or sidekicks. Yet Jakes is willing to render uncharitable verdicts on the family’s character, and the nation’s, too.
One of the Kents wonders if Americans crisscross the continent simply because they are “the damnedest bunch of perpetual malcontents civilization had ever seen” (and he counts himself among the malcontented). A Mexican military officer who fights at the Alamo marvels at America’s “positive passion for rebellion!” An Australian worker in California during the gold rush wonders if Americans’ intolerance of foreigners is a “national disease.” When a Kent helps build the Union Pacific railroad and encounters Native tribes who resent his presence, the crew boss reminds him that “we’re the intruders.” And Amanda confronts the question of whether America’s penchant for fighting began at birth. “We were immortal fools to start this country with a revolution,” a friend tells her. “It’s helped put a stamp of respectability on violence ever since.”
Americans typically justify their causes and conflicts — their respectable violence — by invoking the nation’s early history and principles. The Kents, likewise, always try to live up to family lore, measuring themselves by what “old Philip” did or might have thought. Philip’s great-great-great-granddaughter, an actress like Philip’s mother so many years before, wonders if “all the Kents were encumbered with invisible shackles, put on them in the past and forever preventing them from living in peace” — a harsh description of the weight, burdensome but essential, that historical memory places on a people and a nation.
When he began publishing the American Bicentennial series, Jakes meant to bring the Kents up to 1976, but he fell some 90 years shy. “Just as human beings have a habit of doing, some members of my fictional family went their own ways,” Jakes wrote in the afterword to the final book. Perhaps the Kents, like America, had become too vast to encompass, too complicated for tidy conclusions. Jakes recalled a young fan who suggested an ingenious way to keep the story going: One of Philip’s 20th-century descendants should be a kindly Kansas farmer who finds a super-powerful infant from another world, and names the child Clark. …
But there are no superheroes at the end of this story, just three young Kents whose diverging attitudes — idealism, cynicism, rejection — capture how many Americans still perceive their country.
One of these last Kents, an aspiring doctor, witnesses a young Theodore Roosevelt deliver an Independence Day speech in the Dakota Territory in 1886, and it upends his life. “As you already know your rights and privileges so well,” the future president said, “I am going to ask you to excuse me if I say a few words to you about your duties.” A few words about your duties becomes the doctor’s mantra, propelling him to practice medicine in the tenements of New York, packed with destitute immigrants, rather than marry into a rich but immoral family and cater to wealthy patients. His vocation, he realizes, is with these newest Americans, “the seekers of second chances.”
The next of the three Kents is a handsome charmer who believes in nothing but amassing and flaunting influence. “I’ll probably wind up a politician, or go to hell by some other, equally direct route,” he smirks. He develops a knack for manipulating the masses: All that is needed to “lock up the trainman’s vote,” he decides, is to scream that Jews or anarchists or Black Americans are running wild.
“Obviously someone’s filled your head with that pious garbage the Kent family has been purveying for several generations,” he says to the doctor. “All that rot about Kent family responsibility.”
The third Kent of this generation neither embraces nor disparages the family’s professed values; instead, she concludes they are a lie. When her Jewish husband is killed in an antisemitic attack, she retreats inward and comes to revile her homeland. She mocks the newspaper editorials that her father, an aging Gideon Kent, still publishes. “You love to write about the opportunity in this country,” she says. “I finally understand what you mean. The opportunity to be hated. The opportunity to be killed solely because of who you are.”
Gideon’s rebuttal reads like Jakes’s closing case for America. “I am not arguing that this country is peopled by saints,” Gideon tells his daughter. “Any sane man knows better. But neither is it populated exclusively by devils, as you so blithely imply. The one thing you fail to comprehend about America is that it’s malleable. It is nothing more or less than what we make of it by our action or inaction.” Gideon calls his daughter a “fireside moralist,” one who sits by the fire and issues condemnations, but leaves the work to others.
I loved these books as a child. If I do still, it’s because they present America as a choice, and not a choice you make just once. We aren’t the land of opportunity, or a nation of immigrants, or equal before the law, just because we say that’s what we are. Our leaders don’t respect our rights or derive their powers from our consent just because that’s how it is supposed to be. We become those things — we remain those things — only if we strive for them, without ceasing, and even then nothing is guaranteed. After all, the Declaration did not win independence; it only gave it a purpose.
Even Philip had to choose America once again. He ends up having one last unexpected chance to collect his inheritance, to leave the Colonies for England and live as a man of wealth and title. “Damn heaven, what did he want?” Jakes writes, depicting Philip’s anguish. “Phillipe Charboneau, the bastard heir of a nobleman, or Philip Kent, plain printer’s helper — which was he?”
Rather than seize the opportunity, Philip takes his father’s letter — the precious document that proves his lineage and could ensure his prosperity — and commits it to the flame. I think of that moment as Philip’s own Independence Day, when he extinguished one dream but lit another, when he realized the hard choice was worth the price, when the bastard truly became the American.
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Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT
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