The Wild Blood Dynasty

What a little-known family reveals about the nation's untamed spirit

- Adam Begley

American Bloods—what a title! Hammering out agreement on the meaning of American is hard enough, but factor in blood—our precious bodily fluid, susceptible to poisoning in the fevered fascist imagination—and a brawl might just be brewing. If you’ve figured out that Blood is a surname, the subtitle of John Kaag’s new book (The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation) could possibly defuse the situation, but it too is provocative: If the Blood dynasty shaped the nation, why have we never heard of it?

Kaag, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, lives in a house on the banks of the Concord River that was built in 1745 by a colonial named Josiah Blood. A decade later, in that same house, Thaddeus Blood was born. He was at the scene with a musket on April 19, 1775, when the “shot heard round the world” was fired; as an old man, he was interviewed about the experience by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Kaag saw that the Blood clan would offer him a chance to explore big ideas in relation to individual lives, to start close to home and expand outward, weaving together personalities, cultural history, and philosophy in an attempt to ask not just where we came from but where we're going.

He has made a habit of combining philosophy with first-person narratives of a confessional cast. In American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), he tells us about his first two marriages while communing with his "intellectual heroes," the New England thinkers Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James. In Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (2018), he treks up and down an alp or two with the German iconoclast. The new project is much more ambitious. Working with a bigger cast on an expansive stage, he's hoping to unlock secrets of Americanness. No wonder the strain shows.