Americans love to mine the lives and words of the founding generation for ammunition in many of our current political battles. That's healthy: certain arguments continue to endure in American life across generations, and as we continue to be inspired by the Declaration of Independence, and guided by the text of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it's important to know and be familiar with the lives and political philosophies of the generation which bestowed those documents upon their heirs.
But the founders lived in a very different world than the one they helped, in many ways inadvertently, to create. And the more I learn about them, the more I find myself enjoying the study purely for its own intrinsic value and fascination, and without regard to seeking out ideologically useful quotes or allies. It is fascinating to simply learn about their world and their lives more clearly, without worrying about any modern applications. Why, for example, the Third Amendment? And did they know how infrequently it would come up?
Here are three things the founders feared, which, for better or worse, don't seem to agitate us much any more, examined here merely to better understand the world of Colonial America, and the mindset of its citizens, without any suggestion, one way or the other, that I agree or disagree with these points of view, or that they are or are not capable of any useful modern application:
1. Democracy. When the founders used the term "democracy" they intended it as a pejorative, synonymous with words like "anarchy" or the phrase "mob rule," and they viewed the rise of a democratic ethos in the country with the same degree of horror I now feel about the rise of enthusiasm for Sanders-style socialism among modern Millennials. The founders opposed hereditary monarchy, but that didn't mean they were ready to turn the governance of the country over to the great unwashed. Even Jefferson, who would spin his Republican party as representing the majority of the common people, and accuse the Federalists, by contrast, of being the party of elitism, would opine that the voice of the people was not typically known for its wisdom.
The golden mean solution, between hereditary monarchy and democracy, upon which the Founders originally hoped to build the new nation, was known as "filtration." Indirect, representative, democracy, would ensure that the country's ultimate rulers were chosen through intermediate gatekeeper institutions, so as to prevent the vices of rule by the mob. And so: they created the electoral college, which was originally intended as much more than a mere mathematical exercise. As envisioned at Philadelphia, the members of the electoral college would be those whose lives of prominence proved to their fellow citizens that they were worthy to participate in selecting the American President, a choice which was not to be left to those citizens themselves. That you would have no earthly idea what "elector" you were voting for, whose name would not even appear on the ballot, was not really Madison's original idea. Similarly, for 125 years, until ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, Senators were not chosen by the direct democratic choice of the citizens living in a State, but by the State legislatures, ensuring a degree of separation between the legislators chosen by the people, and the U.S. Senators then chosen by those legislators. This also provided some handy vertical checks and balances, intended to keep the Federal Government in check.
We don't hear much about filtration any more (though George Will still likes to use the term), and most Americans are now pretty sure that democracy is what the founders sought to bequeath us. But were we to find ourselves in a face-to-face conversation with one of the founders, Alexander Hamilton let us say, freshly arrived by time machine into our living room, it's hard to say which side of that conversation would be more bemused and startled by tones with which the other used the term democracy.
2. A standing military. Illustrating a point I have made elsewhere, about the dangers of speaking about the founders in the collective (http://www.mytakesonthat.com/2016/11/the-problem-with-arguments-about-what.html), this next example is not necessarily true, to equal degrees, of all the founders. But at least the Jeffersonian Republicans, if not always the Hamiltonian Federalists, were deeply concerned about the dangers of a standing military. Steeped in Roman history, including the military exploits which allowed Julius and Augustus to turn the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, and aware that, for many years, the Praetorian Guard chose the Caesar, the founders were strongly aware, and many were deeply concerned, about the ways in which a country's military could take control of its civilian government, putting an end to self-rule. Their solution: no standing military in peacetime.
The founders, alas, could see into the past, but not into the future. They were aware of the dangers of the Praetorian Guard, but could not foresee the power of biased journalism in an era of mass media communications, controlled by a tiny elite.
Today, we still hold vigorous "guns vs. butter" debates about the proper scope and extent of our military vs. domestic spending, and we still argue with each other about the propriety of foreign military interventions. We even have a growing chorus of both liberals and libertarians and now even Trumpian anti-globalist populists arguing we should dramatically downscale the presence of American military bases on foreign soil. But it has been many, many, decades since any serious political voices in America have claimed that we should disband the military altogether, until the next war, let alone argued that this was necessary to prevent a military takeover of our governmental institutions. To even suggest such an idea would strike most Americans today as grossly paranoid and delusional. For that, we can largely thank the honorable way in which our military has comported itself throughout our history.
Unlike that of so many other nations over the course of the past 250 years, our own history offers few if any clear-cut examples of attempted military coups, led by successful or popular generals. Instead, again and again, our military has been a blessing to the nation, and its Generals, from Washington to Grant to Eisenhower, have for the most part respected and renewed the precedent and ideal of civilian control. If fear of a standing military has subsided, we can thank our military itself for that fact. Over time, both the military's victories and its deference, taken together, have largely obliterated this founding era fear. The turnaround began when Madison was able to forestall complete disaster for America in the War of 1812, largely due to naval victories brought to him by ships he had voted against building when he served in Congress. The Military Academy of West Point was seen, for many of its initial years, as a waste of money, and was often on the brink of political defunding, until its graduates proved, during the Mexican American War, and then the Civil War, the worth of professional training for military officers, by repeatedly outgeneralling the untrained political generals. When we speak, today, of the debt we owe to our Veterans, we should be grateful not only for the lives they laid on the line to bring us ultimate victories in WWI, WWII, and the many battlefields of the Cold War, but also for having done so without becoming a threat to the sovereignty and self-government of the nation they had sworn to serve.
3. The Rise of a Hereditary Aristocracy. It will probably never be possible for Americans born after 1800 to understand the acute foreboding with which the Revolutionary generation viewed this threat. It was in their minds all too likely that the work of the Revolution would be undone by the rise of an elite and hereditary aristocracy, to be treated with deference by the rest of the citizenry, and afforded special privileges and preferences under the law. And who could blame them for fearing this eventuality? They were not only rebelling from a society in which such a hereditary aristocracy had been an ingrained element of societal order for as long as anyone could remember, but they were also well-read enough to know that the same had been true of virtually every society in the history of Western Civilization, from the Greek City-States to the Roman Empire, with aristocrats once again rising to power in the feudal Europe which succeeded to govern the middle ages after the fall of Rome, including the aristocratic society of Britain.
So great was this fear, that it almost prevented the formation of the Constitution. George Washington's attendance at the Philadelphia Convention was vital to the success of that endeavor, especially as Hamilton and Madison, who had organized and called for the States to send delegates to the conference, had no intention of using the meeting for its advertised purpose. Madison understood that his most important job, prior to the convention, was ensuring Washington's attendance, the only thing which could give the meeting any veneer of legitimacy for the radical and transformative work which he planned to accomplish once it was in session. But there was a problem: a group of Revolutionary War Veterans had formed an organization which they called the Society of the Cincinnati, which was to hold its first meeting in Philadelphia at the same time as Madison and Hamilton's planned convention. Washington had been invited to attend as the society's honorary first president. But when word broke that future membership in the society would be bequeathed upon its initial members' first-born sons, Americans smelled a rat, and began castigating the society as the possible germ from which an American aristocracy might grow. Washington had to decline to attend the society's first meeting, to avoid being accused of seeking to establish an aristocratic body in America. But to save face with his former compatriots, he offered an excuse which did not take any side in the criticism which the society's establishment was generating. This made Madison's job, of getting Washington to endure the awkwardness of setting aside that excuse to attend the Constitutional Convention, to be held in the same city and at the same time , infinitely more difficult. That he somehow pulled it off anyway is one of many testaments to the man's political genius. Without Washington's chairmanship of the convention's deliberations, ratification of the proposed Constitution by the States would likely never have occurred. With it, ratification became a foregone conclusion in many locales.
John Adams, for his part, would go to his grave believing that the rise of an American aristocracy was inevitable, as the history of virtually every other nation he had ever studied amply demonstrated. Rather than forestall it, he felt its inevitable rise should be accounted for in the government's structures, and he believed that this was the chief reason for states and the national government to have a bicameral legislature, as the Senate of any state or national government would inevitably become the place where the aristocrats' views were promulgated, and where the aristocrats should be segregated, to be checked and balanced against the commoners' assembly or congressional house, and by the restraint of a powerful executive. His publication of these views, in treatises on government published after his return from England, did more to damage his reputation, then and now, than perhaps any other act in his life. At the time he was labelled, at best, a crank, and at worst, a monarchist (Jefferson's favorite charge against the Federalists). And today it is argued that Adams clearly became irrelevant after his initial contributions to the fight for a congressional resolution of independence, as his time abroad as an ambassador to the United States, separated him from the developing political philosophies of the younger minds who were writing the Federalist Papers, in which the need for checks and balances were based upon entirely new premises.
This reaction demonstrates how early the fear of a rising aristocracy had waned once the Constitution was in place, as an increasingly larger and larger share of Americans, began demanding an increasingly egalitarian society, with such eventual consensus that the fear of any threat from an emerging aristocratic class soon dissipated. Today, we still worry about elites having too much power in our society, but these worries mainly focus on those who control wealth, or who occupy the spotlight in, or exercise control over, the news and entertainment media, or on large multinational corporations. If the wealth and power of these families and these corporations tends to be inherited, then the fears of an earlier generation about the emergence of an aristocracy may well still come to pass. But nobody seems to think it will be titled or officially recognized; let alone given sole legal access to a Senate which has become the equivalent of the English House of Lords. Some might argue that an unnamed and invisible aristocracy might be even worse than an officially recognized one. But until Bill Gates starts asking his fellow citizens to kiss his ring, the fear of an emergent aristocracy will likely remain in the past for some time to come.
Sources: The Idea of America; Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different; and The Radicalism of the American Revolution, by Gordon S. Wood; American Creation and The Quartet by Joseph J. Ellis; John Adams by David McCullough; Washington, A Life and Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow; Thomas Jefferson, the Art of Power by Jon Meacham; James Madison by Lynn Cheney.
