The 'Founding Fathers' Were Surprisingly Pessimistic

[Celerity]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/opinion/us-founding-fathers-constitution.html




By Jamelle Bouie

It is old hat to note that Americans have deified their “founding fathers” as saints — secular or otherwise. What is a little less obvious is how that deification has frozen them in time. We hail the Thomas Jefferson of 1776, not the one of 1806; the James Madison of 1787 rather than the one of 1827. We remember George Washington the triumphant military leader of 1783 more than George Washington the reluctant president of 1793. The extent to which the founders are frozen in time is most apparent in how they’re used for present-day political purposes. Truth of the matter aside, when speakers say, “This is what the founders intended,” they tend to mean, “This is what the founders intended at the Philadelphia Convention.”

The problem is that the men we call the founders did not stop thinking or writing or acting in politics with ratification of the Constitution. Nor did they stop after serving in office. Even when retired from public life, they continued to comment on current affairs, to express their highest hopes and aspirations as well as their deepest fears and apprehensions. Those fears and apprehensions are the subject of a recent book by Dennis C. Rasmussen, a political scientist at Syracuse University. In “Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders,” Rasmussen walks readers through the later-in-life correspondence of Jefferson, Washington, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, each of whom feared for the fate of the American republic following their service in the government they created. And for good reason.

“There were few precedents or fixed poles to guide the nation’s lawmakers,” Rasmussen writes, “and the very fate of republican liberty seemed to them to hinge on their every decision.” A “sense of crisis pervaded the era” and the founders’ correspondence was “littered with predictions of imminent collapse.” Washington, Rasmussen notes, was consumed with fear of “faction” — political parties and their consequences for the future of the republic. “Until within the last year or two,” he told Jefferson in a July 1796 letter, “I had no conception that Parties Would, or even could go, the length I have been Witness to.” Over the previous year, Washington had been embroiled in a swirling political storm over the Jay Treaty. Negotiated by John Jay, then the chief justice of the United States, the treaty attempted to resolve a number of issues still outstanding after the end of the Revolutionary War. Attacked as a brazen giveaway to Britain, the treaty inspired furious reaction from Washington’s Republican opposition, which emerged in his second term under the leadership of Jefferson and Madison. “The backlash against the treaty,” Rasmussen writes, “was like nothing” Washington “had experienced before.”

The Republican press turned its sights squarely on the once-untouchable president, using every term of abuse it could muster and levelling every charge it could concoct, no matter how implausible. Washington was senile; he was a blasphemer; he was a womanizer; he had embezzled public funds; he was a tool of the British crown or desired a crown of his own; Hamilton not only controlled him behind the scenes but was somehow also his illegitimate son; Washington had been a secret British agent during the Revolutionary War, and his efforts to betray the patriotic cause were foiled by Benedict Arnold beating him to the punch. Washington’s famous farewell address — in which he warned against faction — was as much about the circumstances of his own administration as it was a warning to future Americans. In his final year, however, Washington seemed to surrender to the reality of parties and factionalism. Asked to consider a third term for president, he told the governor of Connecticut, Jonathan Trumbull, that he was “thoroughly convinced I should not draw a single vote from the Anti-federal side” and that character was irrelevant to the outcomes of elections. “Let that party set up a broomstick, and call it a true son of Liberty, a Democrat, or give it any other epithet that will suit their purpose, and it will command their votes in toto!”

snip

[FBaggins]

1. The author appears to make the same mistake that he sees in others

That is... attributing to the "founding fathers" opinions of a limited subset of them over a limited time.

I'd also disagree that "we remember George Washington the triumphant military leader of 1783 more than George Washington the reluctant president of 1793" since his farewell address of 1796 is so widely read and quoted.

[Celerity]

5. The average American for SURE remembers Washington the way the author says, more than the farewell

address Washington. IF they even remember him at all (especially once you get down into the bottom half of historically ignorant Americans).

[Mysterian]

2. Well, the faction thing turned out to be a valid concern

The USA now has a faction, callled the republican party, that no longer desires to participate in a democracy and seeks total control.

[underpants]

3. Now that's some conspiracy theorying

The Republican press turned its sights squarely on the once-untouchable president, using every term of abuse it could muster and leveling every charge it could concoct, no matter how implausible. Washington was senile; he was a blasphemer; he was a womanizer; he had embezzled public funds; he was a tool of the British crown or desired a crown of his own; Hamilton not only controlled him behind the scenes but was somehow also his illegitimate son; Washington had been a secret British agent during the Revolutionary War, and his efforts to betray the patriotic cause were foiled by Benedict Arnold beating him to the punch.

[Wounded Bear]

4. I prefer to think of them as being realists...

they made compromises, the consequences of which we are still feeling because they became embedded in the Constitution.

The document which basically worked for a couple of generations with a small number of states has become unworkable with so many states and so many politicians willing to prevent any action at all using the basic rules of our own government. It is the one weakness of all democracies. In trying to prevent a 'tyranny of the majority' which leads to forms of mob rule of populism, we expose ourselves to a tyranny of the minority, just another form of authoritarianism.

They did the best they could, but in the end none of them were true democrats. The Founding Fathers were all businessmen, from the merchants of the Northeast (read smugglers to the gentleman farmers of the South-slave holders to a man. They wore the mantle of creating our national government, and they were all just men, with feet of clay and various vices and weaknesses.

Their blindness to the growth of political parties is regrettable TBS.

[bahboo]

6. it has always been thus....