Americans have always taken great delight in justifying their political actions by appeals to the founding fathers. That tradition is alive and flourishing today.
The Tea Party, of course, is named for those Boston patriots who decided to protest the British Parliament’s levying of a tax on tea, dressed themselves up as Indians, went aboard a ship loaded with tea, and heaved it into the Boston harbor. So much for taxing the colonies without giving them proper parliamentary representation. Those patriots, like the modern Tea Party, demanded that government be responsible to the people.
There is a school of legal thought called originalism which demands rigid adherence to the original meaning of the Constitution with virtually no room for interpretation in the light of some 200 years plus of American history. And Glenn Beck a few years ago wrote a book he said was in the spirit of Thomas Paine. Everybody wants a piece of the founders.
The founding fathers still have much to teach us, to be sure. They were the greatest group of political scientists in American history and likely in world history. They put together a revolution unlike any before or since. They created a government structure that has endured for 200 plus years and has served as the basis of the most powerful nation in world history.
The founders’ very real accomplishments demand that we modern Americans examine honestly their standards for the meaning of democratic governance or what they would call republicanism.
One way of doing this is by looking at the personal qualities of the founders. George Washington and Ben Franklin were among the most revered of these early giants.
Franklin has been called justly the First American. He was born poor but died rich making a fortune before age 40 and devoting his time from then on to various forms of public service. Franklin was a community organizer -- he organized a philosophical club, a lending library, a fire department and he was an early pioneer in the abolition movement.
George Washington amazed the world when he returned to his farm after leading America to independence. This was not what military leaders were supposed to do. They were expected to take power and become a king or a dictator. Washington did what he needed to do and returned to private life--an historically unusual action but one that kept alive the spirit of republicanism in America in peacetime as his generalship had kept it alive during the war.
What was the meaning of republicanism back then, and how does it relate to contemporary issues such as taxation, economic inequality and the common good?
There is considerable contemporary evidence from the Revolutionary period and in the scholarship on the period. Thomas Paine, for instance, wrote an essay on the necessity of taxation in 1782 as the war was ending. “When America resolved on independence, and determined to be free,” Paine wrote, “she naturally included within that resolution all the means, whether of men or money, necessary to effect it.” Taxation, Paine said, was a light difficulty, compared with what so many were going through. “The idea of getting rich had not in those days an existence,” said the great revolutionary propagandist.
A key theme of republicanism was the vital necessity of equality both in politics and economics. This did not mean men would not advance or that there was strict, still less an enforced, egalitarism. Rather, it was a belief that merit, and not favoritism or power based on money, should be the basis of political success.
The founders saw clearly the corrupting influence of money in political life. They wanted a society in which none would be too rich or too poor. There were even attempts to limit the amount of land that any one man or family could possess, and thereby limit the power such a powerful landowner could exercise over his fellow citizens.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood notes in “The Creation of the American Republic” that for most Americans who subscribed to a whig political theory, that is to say most American revolutionaries, nothing prevented the abuse of authority so much as equality in the state. Wood quotes Langdon Carter who wrote in 1760 that America could not allow a minority to differ from the majority when the future of the society was at stake. It was commonly understood, wrote a Puritan divine, that exorbitant wealth of a few individuals would have a "baneful effect" on the maintenance of republican government.
A properly functioning government writes Wood has one central purpose: “The sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed the essence of Republicanism and comprehended for Americans the idealistic goal of the Revolution.” It was, in short, the common good that was the goal of government. In fact, “The common good would be the only objective of government.” Revolutionary leaders saw clearly the dangers of “Sacrificing the public good to the private greed of small ruling groups.” This concern found explicit expression in the Preamble to the Constitution, where promotion of the “general welfare” was stated as one of the Constitution’s principal objectives.
The importance of the common good could be traced even to the Bible. Those who claim that America was founded as a “Christian nation” grossly misunderstand the many and varied influences on the founders. But, even if they were right, it is hard to see how the biblical Christianity professed by the vast majority of the founding generation of Americans provided any warrant for the rejection of the common good so frequently championed today.
The fathers understood full well the complexity and fragility of the government they formed. What have you given us, a woman supposedly asked Ben Franklin as he left the constitutional convention. “A republic, madame, if you can keep it,” Franklin replied.
Have we kept faith with the ideals of American republicanism? Or, are we just dressing up like Indians? Concern for the common good animated our founders and those who forget that fact misrepresent the American founding, they do not honor it.
