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Founders Chic: Our reverence for the Fathers has gotten out of hand

H. W. BRANDS

"The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other,"

John Adams wrote to Benjamin Rush in 1790. "The essence of the whole will be that Dr.

Franklin's electrical rod smote the Earth and out sprung General Washington. That

Franklin electrified him with his rod, and thence forward these two conducted all the

policy, negotiations, legislatures and war."

Adams never liked being wrong. Yet he, rather than George Washington or Benjamin

Franklin, is the lion of recent historical literature. David McCullough's Pulitzer

Prize-winning ​John Adams​, with more than 1.5 million hardcover copies in print, has enthralled American readers and elevated Adams—in the popular mind, at least—to the

very first rank of American heroes. Not that the other Founders are faring badly. Joseph

J. Ellis won a Pulitzer for his best-selling ​Founding Brothers​ (2000), a group portrait of the Washington-Franklin-Adams generation, which followed his ​American Sphinx

(1997), a National Book Award-winning study of Thomas Jefferson. ​Founding Brothers

describes the Founders as "America's first and, in many respects, its only natural

aristocracy." (Washington's life is next in line for the Ellis treatment.) Richard

Brookhiser has written recent appreciations of Washington, Adams, and Alexander

Hamilton. Franklin, the oldest of the Founders, lives again in my book ​The First

American​ (2000), which had the good fortune to make the best-seller lists. Edmund Morgan's 2002 portrait of Franklin was also a hit; Walter Isaacson's admiring ​Benjamin

Franklin: An American Life​ appeared this summer.

Why the sudden interest in the Founders? Or was it ever thus?

In fact it was ​not​ ever thus. Interest in the Founders has risen and fallen over time, as has admiration for them and their accomplishments. Although such things are hard to

measure, it's probably fair to say that their stock is currently at an all-time high. It's also

fair, and necessary, to say that this isn't entirely a blessing for their country. In revering

the Founders we undervalue ourselves and sabotage our own efforts to make

improvements—necessary improvements—in the republican experiment they began.

Our love for the Founders leads us to abandon, and even to betray, the very principles

they fought for.

The Founders were anything but demigods to themselves and their contemporaries, who

recognized full well that the experiment in self-government had only begun. Washington

came closest to apotheosis in his time, but even he rubbed many republicans the wrong

way. His aloofness was legendary. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787 the convivial

Gouverneur Morris boasted that he could soften up the austere general. Hamilton dared

him to try, saying that if he would clap Washington on the shoulder and make

companionable small talk, Hamilton would buy dinner for Morris and friends. Morris

accepted the challenge, and greeted Washington like an old drinking partner.

Washington instantly grew stiffer than usual; he icily removed Morris's arm from his

shoulder, stepped away in disgust, and drove Morris from the room with an ominous

glower. "I have won the bet," Morris said at the promised dinner, "but paid dearly for it,

and nothing could induce me to repeat it."

Washington's haughtiness helped to win him the presidency: despite the Revolution,

deference to rank wasn't dead in America. But it was losing ground to egalitarianism.

Philip Freneau, the editor of the ​National Gazette​, regularly denounced Washington as a monarchist: "He holds levees like a King, receives congratulations on his birthday like

a King, makes treaties like a King, answers petitions like a King, employs his old

enemies like a King." Benjamin Franklin Bache, Freneau's comrade-in-opposition (and

the grandson of Benjamin Franklin), compared Washington to Oliver Cromwell and

Louis XVI. In the columns of the ​Philadelphia Aurora​, Bache alleged "political iniquity" and "legalized corruption" in the Washington Administration, and called the first

President "the source of all the misfortunes of our country." Thomas Paine, the leading

propagandist of the Revolution, accused Washington of abandoning the cause for which

the Revolution was fought (not to mention abandoning Paine in a French prison, where

he languished during the French Revolution). In an open letter to Washington,

addressing him in the third person, Paine wrote, "[Washington] has no friendships ...

He is incapable of forming any. He can serve or desert a man, or a cause, with

constitutional indifference; and it is this cold, hermaphrodite faculty that imposed itself

upon the world and was credited for a while, by enemies as by friends, for prudence,

moderation and impartiality."

Washington believed that his sacrifices and service to the country had earned him

better. His decision to step down after two terms owed much, as he put it to Hamilton,

to his "disinclination to be longer buffeted in the public prints by a set of infamous

scribblers." When he handed the presidency to John Adams, he did so with palpable

relief. "Me thought I heard him think," Adams recalled, "'Ay! I am fairly out and you are

fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!'"

Adams soon decided, being as sensitive to criticism as Washington and even more

subject to it. Benjamin Bache tore into him as "the blasted tyrant of America" and "a

ruffian deserving of the curses of mankind." He taxed Adams for obesity, referring to

him as "His Rotundity," the possessor of a "sesquipedality of belly."

By Adams's tenure, the hope for a politics above party—the initial dream of the

Founders—had been dashed on the twin rocks of majority rule and the French

Revolution. Majority rule required coalitions, the stabler the better; the French

Revolution ideologically polarized these coalitions. Adams's Federalists faced off against

Jefferson's Republicans and held on tightly to the levers of power. The Alien and

Sedition Acts of 1798 attempted to outlaw criticism and to prevent the Republicans from

recruiting new voters among recent immigrants. The measures provoked predictable

outrage. A Republican patron of a tavern in Newark wobbled into the street in time to

observe a sixteen-gun salute to President Adams and to wish aloud that one of the

rounds should find Adams's ample rear. His arrest prompted a New York paper to worry

that "joking may be very dangerous even to a free country."

Yet the Republicans were in certain respects the least of Adams's worries. Adams fell out

with Hamilton, whom he called "the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar," and Hamilton

devoted a long pamphlet to cataloguing the President's deficiencies. His defection

delighted the Republicans. Describing the Hamilton pamphlet as a "thunderbolt," James

Madison told Jefferson, "I rejoice with you that Republicanism is likely to be so

completely​ triumphant." Indeed it was: the split among the Federalists opened the door to Jefferson and the Republicans in the election of 1800.

The Republican victory was even sweeter for the scurrilous things the Federalists had

said during the campaign. Jefferson was called "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the

son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." His deism shocked

pious Christians (though it wasn't much different from that of Washington or Franklin

or many other educated persons of his day), and his early enthusiasm for the French

Revolution made him a Jacobin in Federalist eyes. Timothy Dwight, a Congregationalist

minister and the president of Yale, foresaw a lurid future of freethinking: "The Bible cast

into a bonfire ... our children ... chanting mockeries against God ... our wives and

daughters the victims of legal prostitution ... our sons the disciples of Voltaire, and the

dragoons of Marat." A Connecticut paper warned of the orgies a Jefferson presidency

would bring: "Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will all be openly taught and

practiced; the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed; the soil will be soaked with

blood, and the nation black with crimes."

When Jefferson became President and the heavens didn't quite fall, his enemies found

other means of attack, including the charge, originated by James Callender and avidly

circulated by the Federalist press, that Jefferson had fathered several children by one of

his slaves, Sally Hemings. The steamy tales took sundry forms, including verse: "Of all

the damsels on the green / On mountain or in valley / A lass so luscious ne'er was seen /

As Monticellan Sally." Historians and forensic geneticists would still be debating the

accuracy of the paternity charge two centuries later. In Jefferson's day, as the

Federalists' campaign of slander made plain, accuracy was beside the point.

And now they are back. The Founders' revival is in part a reflection of the anti-liberal

reaction that began with Ronald Reagan and continues today. Combined with this, no

doubt, is a certain roots-seeking among readers, which increased as the new millennium

approached and hasn't let up in the troubling time since. Beyond the zeitgeist, the

current revival reflects an appreciation of some brilliant writing. McCullough and Ellis

are two of the finest nonfiction stylists now writing, and would attract readers whatever

their subject. (McCullough won his spurs, and much of his following, by recounting

natural disasters and the construction of public works.)

Shouldn't we applaud the Founders' restored popularity? Isn't patriotism a good thing,

especially amid our current difficulties? Yes—but like anything else, it can be taken too

far. And when it causes us to overvalue those who have preceded us, it does harm. Here

a personal note may be in order. Since my book on Franklin was published, in the

autumn of 2000, I have given numerous talks around the country on Franklin and his

times. Listeners are appreciative, and they ask various questions after I finish. But one

question, worded one way or another, comes up at almost every session: How was it that

America was so blessed with intellect and virtue at the moment of its founding? And, by

implication, Why is it that the current generation falls so short?

I don't dismiss the premise. But I do point out that the Founders' work was very much

unfinished at the time the torch was passed to the next generation, and that tidying up

the loose ends took eighty years and one of the most destructive wars in the history of

the world before 1914. Whether I change many minds about the Founders is hard to say.

Most people still seem to think that God or fate or something smiled on America in the

1770s and 1780s, and hasn't smiled that way since.

Americans aren't alone in looking to a golden age, but in our case this inhibits action on

important public issues. We marvel that our predecessors, living at a time when the free

population of the country didn't exceed the population of greater Chicago today, could

have gained independence from Britain and fashioned a republic that has lasted more

than two centuries; and we bewail our inability, in a population eighty times as large, to

find anyone like them. Leaving aside the statistical improbability of this supposed lack

(which only confirms true believers in their conviction of America's miraculous birth),

the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries doesn't bear out the golden-age

idea.

The Founders got the country off to a good start, but they would have been the first to

admit that it was no more than a start. They were acutely aware of the continuing nature

of their experiment in self-government, and they expected future generations to

accomplish as much as they had. They would have dismissed as ludicrous the notion

that theirs was a blessed generation, to which others might never compare. That notion

is essentially anti-republican, too, and therefore insults all they struggled to achieve.

In making giants of the Founders, we make pygmies of ourselves; in making saints of

them, we make sinners of ourselves. Sinners we may be, but no more so than they

(where is our Benedict Arnold? our Aaron Burr?). And although humility is a virtue,

when consciousness of our sins becomes an inferiority complex that causes large

numbers of the present generation to turn away from politics as incomparably inept or

corrupt, it does the Founders no honor. The point of their revolution was to craft a

government based on the will of the people; they would have judged themselves failures

if they thought their mechanism required saints to run it.

Another question I hear frequently is, What would Franklin think if he were restored to

the world of the living? I answer that he would be tickled by the technological advances

since the eighteenth century. I also say that he would be gratified by the durability of the

republic that he and his fellows established, and by some of the recent accomplishments

of their successors. As an early abolitionist, Franklin would be delighted at the

civil-rights reforms of the 1960s, which transformed race relations in this country

almost as thoroughly as did the Civil War and Reconstruction, and far more positively

than anything the Founders managed. As a lifelong opponent of authoritarianism, he

would be thrilled at twentieth-century America's defeat of fascism and communism.

British imperialism was oppressive, but George III was neither as dangerous nor

anywhere near as evil as Hitler and Stalin.

But Franklin would be dismayed by the popular denigration of politics, and exceedingly

impatient with us for acting helpless in the face of problems that the Founders would

have tackled at once. To take one example, arguments over the Second Amendment,

with its almost certainly inadvertent ambiguity about the relation of militia service to

gun ownership, would largely cease if we simply rewrote it. Gun advocates already treat

the militia clause as a nullity; let them erase the clause—or try to. Gun opponents want

the clause to govern gun ownership; let them rewrite the amendment—or try to. But

almost no one suggests such an obvious solution to the problem. Instead we treat the

Constitution as holy writ, to be parsed and glossed but not otherwise tampered with. We

agonize over "original intent" as if what the Founders believed ought to determine the

way we live two centuries later. They would have laughed, and then wept, at our

timidity.

The same applies to any number of other issues. It is fair to say that nearly all the

Founders would have been shocked at the overwhelming role of money in modern

American politics. (Franklin thought the President, for example, ought to serve without

pay.) When they decried "corruption" in British politics, and cited it as a prime reason

for their revolt against King George, they were talking about the very thing—the golden

triangle of wealth, access, and office—that campaign-finance reformers decry today. But

until now every effort to diminish the role of money in politics has been stymied by the

First Amendment, which has been interpreted by the courts as equating political

advertising with political speech. Many other countries simply limit how much money

may be spent on campaigns. There is no reason we can't too—if we simply recognize that

we may have to rewrite the First Amendment. This rewriting would be far closer to the

true spirit of the Founders than some misplaced reverence for their handiwork. Of

course, an amendment-blocking coalition, either in Congress or in the states, could

ensure that the First Amendment was left as is. But at least we would have had an open

debate.

Or consider the Electoral College. It is surrounded by the same mystique that befogs

other aspects of the Constitution. For decades it was easy to consider the Electoral

College a harmless vestige—or to predict that should it ever again confer victory on a

popular loser, as it had in 1876 and in 1888, there would be such an outcry that it would

be abolished. But in the aftermath of the presidential election of 2000 the outcry quickly

faded into silence. Nearly everyone agrees that the Electoral College is undemocratic,

and that if modern Americans wrote the Constitution, it wouldn't be included. But we

can't get ourselves to do anything about it. Ironically, the system we are so reluctant to

touch works not at all the way the Founders intended (they anticipated autonomy

among the individual electors—which would, in fact, have been even less democratic).

The Founders, far from being pleased at our respect for their work (which in this case

doesn't even reflect their intent), would have been appalled at our paralysis.

Some will argue that the Constitution ought not to be tinkered with. This bears

consideration to the extent that the argument is an honest one and not simply an

apology for the status quo. One of the beauties of the federal Constitution, in contrast to

many state constitutions, is that it deals in broad and enduring principles—principles

that have allowed it to last. But an uncritical embrace of constitutional beauty can

degenerate into the same form of ancestor worship that shapes much of our thinking

about the Founders. ​They​ certainly weren't beguiled by the past; though they spoke of their ancient rights as Englishmen, they knew full well that they were leaping into an

uncharted future. And the last thing they intended their revolution to produce was a

new orthodoxy.

The one trait the Founders shared to the greatest degree is the one most worth striving

after today—but also one that is often forgotten in the praise of their asserted genius.

These men were no smarter than the best their country can offer now; they weren't wiser

or more altruistic. They may have been more learned in a classical sense, but they knew

much less about the natural world, including the natural basis of human behavior. They

were, however, far bolder than we are. When they signed the Declaration of

Independence, they put their necks in a noose; when they wrote the Constitution, they

embarked on an audacious and unprecedented challenge to custom and authority. For

their courage they certainly deserve our admiration. But even more they deserve our

emulation.