Can we stop with the Founding Fathers already? In Dayona Dodd’s column “Neither party works for us” in Wednesday’s Daily Lobo, we were once again treated to a phenomenon that has become rather prominent in our nation’s political discourse: the misguided “appeal to the Founding Fathers.”
The typical incarnation is generally, as in Dodd’s and Gardiner’s cases, in reference to some lack of order, efficacy, or assorted decorum that our government is perpetually exhibiting.
While this notion of “Founders knew best” is frivolous insofar as it’s frivolous for anybody to postulate what people who lived 237 years ago would think of the modern world, its assumptions are, additionally, utterly ahistorical. Let’s consider a few contexts in which this argument is deployed.
First, drawing from Dodd’s guest column, “the Founding Fathers would be appalled at how our elected leaders have misused their powers and have reinterpreted their abilities as stated in the Constitution.” In fact, there are numerous instances in which the Founding Fathers — specifically Jefferson, Adams, Washington and Hamilton — demonstrated this very behavior.
In the case of Washington, Adams and Hamilton, their positions as Federalist stalwarts should be proof enough of their belief in our nation’s need for a strong executive branch bordering on monarchy. In fact, Alexander Hamilton once said “Julius Caesar is the greatest man who ever lived.”
Even Jefferson — founder of American republicanism, champion of small government and intellectual father of James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution” — went over Congress’ head to purchase the Louisiana Territory during his presidency, knowing full well that it was an abuse of his powers.
In reference to Washington, D.C.’s supposed partisanship and lack of civility, here are a few points. The early years of our nation were deeply partisan: Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans were in constant battle against John Adams’ Federalists. If someone’s character wasn’t being assassinated, it wasn’t D.C.
For example, Thomas Jefferson in reference to prominent Federalist Alexander Hamilton: “(he is) a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which not only has received and given him bread, but heaped its honors on his head.”
Which is essentially the 19th-century equivalent of “F**k that guy.”
Finally, and most egregiously, the idea that the Founding Fathers were somehow morally supreme beings, above the petty tactics of politicians, is a complete fiction in light of their treatment of slavery.
Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, in fact, discouraged Thomas Jefferson’s inclusion of any rebuke of slavery in the Declaration of Independence, knowing full well that doing so would be a deal-breaker for the Southern colonies whose cooperation was essential to the success of the American Revolution.
It is clear: our Founding Fathers allowed one of the world’s greatest human rights violations to persist for political reasons.
In conclusion, I do understand the compulsion, however misguided, to romanticize the Founders. Americans, in part because of our compelling and unprecedented advent, are a people with deeply romantic tendencies when it comes to our history. This is a reality which has inevitably lead to the near mythic view we take of our Founders and their work.
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The truth, however, as it often is, is much more complex, and what I’ve highlighted here is just the tip of the iceberg.
Shakespeare wrote “the devil can cite scripture to his purpose,” and so to can the Founders be quoted to anyone’s ends, and, appropriately so, to my ends, in this quote from John Adams: “Facts are stubborn things: and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
