While I understand and agree with what you said about (many) people only knowing the classics through the interpretive works of others, I'm not entirely sure that there wasn't a "Golden Age" in our Republic, at least very early on.
If you read McCullough's "John Adams" (and I suspect you have), you can see countless letters and transcripts cited where Adams (and his colleagues) discuss in great detail not only contemporaries like Tocqueville and Adam Sith, but Socrates and Cicero and other Roman historians and statesmen. It's clear that the Founding Fathers were incredibly well read, and well read on the source material.
I'm not sure when that ended in American history, but it certainly did end, and the internet has only made it worse.
“If you read McCullough’s ‘John Adams’ (and I suspect you have), you can see countless letters and transcripts cited where Adams (and his colleagues) discuss in great detail not only contemporaries like Tocqueville and Adam Sith, but Socrates and Cicero and other Roman historians and statesmen. It’s clear that the Founding Fathers were incredibly well read, and well read on the source material”
It’s true that they were well-educated, especially concerning the now all but lost classical world. Which is all the more impressive when you appreciate how scarce were books. They were far-flung from the center of European culture. Large publishing projects weren’t often attempted on American soil. Books sifted across the Atlantic, in streams or drips. There were local and academic libraries, mail-order enterprises, lending circles, or friends and colleagues to borrow from. But nothing like what is available to us today.
Unlikely, since Tocqueville published the first volume of his great work in 1835 and John Adams died in 1826.