Some people have a knack for being just outside the room where it happens. For the Anglo-American Blood family, that knack persisted through generations of an extensive clan, from its origin in the violent border region of Northumberland, through the Puritan migration and the settling of Massachusetts, to the opening of the West, the Civil War, and the consolidation of the United States into an industrial power. If there was a formative moment in American history, a Blood was somewhere close by. And, usually lurking in the background, was a wolf, symbolic of the family’s status as “apex predators” and the wildness of America at its most authentic.
That, at least, is the thesis of American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation, a new book by John Kaag, a prizewinning author and the chair of the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. For Kaag, the Bloods
embodied the risks and rewards that were taken in laying claim to the lands that would become the United States, a testament to how life, liberty, and happiness, are ideas realized in process, honed not in their total fulfillment but in their ongoing, often dangerous and misguided, pursuit . . . on the edge of things, on the borders of experience, murmuring “ever not quite.”
They were “a clan of inexplicable and untamed beasts.” Heady stuff. The question is whether the Bloods, many of whom seem to have shared little more than their eyecatching surname
