In Defense of the Founding Fathers
Recently I have been exposed quite a bit to the gentlemen who worked to create the United States through what I have been teaching in my American Lit class, the Apple TV series Franklin, and an interesting article in The Atlantic discussing the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The article noted above correctly mentions that “…the very idea of trying to tell some sort of national story—much less one with patriotic overtones—has itself been called into question,” going on to reference the turn in understanding our shared history recently and what symbols we have to rally around as we prepare to celebrate 250 years of the “American experiment.” Between The 1619 Project, George Floyd, Covid, and whatever we are calling the “woke” movement, we have, as a culture, completely thrown the founding fathers under the bus. And while there are very reasonable documented reasons to do so, we have to understand two extremely important realities: One – they were human beings with human emotions, human desires, human flaws, and two – they were attempting to build a new answer to governance that stood in the face of thousands of years of a system that had been practiced and utilized across the known world (West and East).
When I teach Jefferson in my class, I always begin with a disclaimer to my students that when it comes to this figure in history you have to understand that he was a deeply complicated individual. When you read his letters, Notes on the State of Virginia, and the Declaration of Independence (the unredacted one from his Autobiography) what you run into is a man who clearly bought John Locke wholesale and tried to square the British philosopher’s ideas with his own personal appetites that led him to living far beyond his means (leaving his daughter with a financial disaster at his death) and clearly against his own words. However you look at Jefferson, no one can deny that he wrote what may be the most important sentence in the history of the West: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (note he changed property to the pursuit of happiness – see Locke). In this sentence I have found that from the beginning they knew they were upsetting not just the applecart, but the whole damn field of apple trees. What we also tend to forget as a culture is that when they agreed to sign the document, every one of them knew they were signing their death warrant. We tend to overlook the fact that they knew if the revolution failed, they would all be put to death for treason against George and Great Britain.
Ben Franklin, when leaving the Constitutional Convention, noted about the constitution:
For when you assemble a Number of Men to have the Advantage of their joint Wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those Men all their Prejudices, their Passions, their Errors of Opinion, their local Interests, and their selfish Views. From such an Assembly can a perfect Production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this System approaching so near to Perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our Enemies, who are waiting with Confidence to hear that our Councils are confounded, like those of the Builders of Babel, and that our States are on the Point of Separation, only to meet hereafter for the Purpose of cutting one another’s Throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.
What can also be found in letters between Jefferson and Madison, as well as the Federalist papers, is a desire to create something that would be flexible enough to be amended as the country grew and changed. Between 1776 and 1789 these men, who have been hastily judged from a 21st century point of view, had a foresight to know that what they could not fix in that moment could and would be fixed in years to come. I have repeatedly defended the genius of the amendment clause in the Constitution. The most poignant case of this is the recurring argument from progressives about the 3/5ths clause in the Constitution. While it was originally put in as they correctly point out, it was also removed through the amendment process – specifically in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. The First Amendment, Thirteenth Amendment, Fifteenth Amendment, and Nineteenth Amendment are further cases of how we have, as a nation, continued to rectify what was not during the original Constitutional Convention.
And this leads me to my frustration – at what point are we going to realize that, although we still have far to go in continuing to form a more perfect union, why have we not seen what we have done so far? When I walk into my classrooms, I see a room full of diversity that was not even possible one hundred years ago. White, black, brown, gay, straight, non-binary, trans – these are the things I see in my classroom. All with different stories, all with different goals, all with human emotions, human desires, and human flaws. It is not the eighteenth century and hasn’t been for a long time. But what those men created in the Continental Congress and later the Constitutional Convention changed the way nations could govern themselves, could give power to the populace, could create a place for the exchange of ideas, and could grant the people the right to amend what once may have seemed a good idea but just doesn’t make sense anymore.
So, as we grow close to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I propose that we realize that a group of humans did what many of us are too afraid to do: they literally put their lives on the line so we could type essays like this one and post it to a site like Substack. That in itself is the symbol of these last 248 years - the amendment that gave us the freedom of speech – it was so important to them that it was the first thing they fixed. I think it’s time to realize what those men did and celebrate the fact that human emotions, human desires, and human flaws came together at a crucial moment in history to change how human beings lived with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
-BB