Like it or not, there’s a very good chance that your favorite Founding Father would quite vociferously disagree with some of your politics!
That needn’t hurt your feelings.
Like it or not, there’s a very good chance that you too would quite vehemently disagree with some of the politics of your favorite Founding Father!
Wrong assumptions abound in politics!
And one of the biggest assumptions we tend to make is that we don’t make any!
Few topics compel us to confront our assumptions in politics than that of our favorite Founding Fathers. And confronting those assumptions about our favorite historical politicians can help us confront our assumptions about our favorite current politicians and even our assumptions about our least favorite current politicians.
Generally, we tend to make careless assumptions about our favorite Founding Fathers because we are not always as comprehensive as we should in researching the whole gamut of reasons for people’s political positions, the motivations behind those positions, and the circumstances under which they formed and adopted them.
Let’s start with a simple and perhaps simplistic example from America’s foremost founding Father: George Washington.
He surely would have sounded like a tax-cut candidate when he wrote a friend: “I think the Parliament of Great Britain has no more right to put their hands in my pocket, without my consent, as I have to put my hands into yours for money.” He certainly would have made his position on taxes much clearer by consequently leading the American Revolution against Great Britain. Yet he also would have seemed like a tax-hike president when, in 1794, he led an army 12,000 strong to quash the Whiskey Rebellion by whiskey tax evaders in Pennsylvania, whom Alexander Hamilton labeled “the wicked insurgents of the west.”
Speaking of Alexander Hamilton, let’s now look at the man whom historian Ron Chernow labeled the Father of the American government. He surely sounded like a dove when, in championing the Jay Treaty of 1794-1795, which averted another war with Britain, he said, “If there be a foreign power, which sees with envy or ill will our growing prosperity, that power must discern that our infancy is the time for clipping our wings.” Yet he also certainly seemed like a war hawk in 1798 when he prescribed the formation of a large army to confront a belligerent France. Wrote Chernow in Alexander Hamilton: “When it had been a question of possible war with Great Britain a few years earlier, Hamilton had been willing to make concessions and negotiate at length to avoid hostilities. But his foreign-policy views frequently varied with the situation, and he now adopted a much tougher tone when France was the potential belligerent power.”
Now to the Founding Father who initiated America’s Westward expansion: Thomas Jefferson.
He surely would have come across as a strict constructionist who believed in small government, hence the Jeffersonian maxim: “Government is best which governs least. Yet he also would have seemed like a broad constructionist when he doubled the size of the United States by authorizing the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, using his archrival Alexander Hamilton’s system of finance to fund it—a system he had publicly opposed for 15 years. He would later concede to James Madison: “The less we say about the constitutional difficulties respecting Louisiana, the better.”
The moral of the story is this: The benefit of the doubt we afford your favorite Founding Fathers is the same benefit of the doubt we should give to our least favorite current politicians today. Furthermore, we should confront all our assumptions and strive to eliminate as much doubt as possible by comprehensively researching the whole gamut of reasons for people’s political positions, the motivations behind those positions, and the circumstances under which they formed and adopted them, whether it’s our least favorite current politicians or our favorite Founding Fathers or our fellow countrymen.
Be the first to comment