What Would the Founders Do Today? (June/July 2006 | Volume: 57, Issue: 3)

What Would the Founders Do Today?

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Authors: Richard Brookhiser

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

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June/July 2006 | Volume 57, Issue 3

Who cares what the founders would do? Who believes that the experiences, opinions, or plans of men who lived 200 years ago could have any relevance to our problems? Who imagines that the founders could answer our questions?

We do. I have heard it with my own ears. Over the past decade, I have given hundreds of talks about the founding fathers, on radio and TV, and to live audiences. Every time there is an opportunity for Q-and-A, there is at least one question of the form, “What would Founder X think about current event or living person Y ?” No subject is too trivial, no problem too difficult. Audiences want to know what those geniuses would do about guns, taxes, race, the war on drugs, the war in Iraq; about Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush.

A recent talk about Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary and the first (and so far only) former Treasury Secretary to be shot, was typical. The host was a financial services firm on Park Avenue. The crowd was young to middle-aged, white collar–white shirtsleeve, on their lunch break. Out of 200 people, a dozen asked questions. Four wanted Hamilton’s opinion about a contemporary issue: the balance of trade, recent decisions of the Supreme Court on federalism, the New York Stock Exchange, and the tone of modern politics (the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004 were fresh in everyone’s mind). The man had been dead for two centuries; the duel he died in is still the most familiar thing about him (that, and his rather GQ -ish portrait on the $10 bill). Yet a crowd whose business is to anticipate tomorrow’s business wanted to know what he would think about the stories that were on that day’s Bloomberg.

Americans have been asking what the founders would do since those men died. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln kicked off his first presidential campaign with a speech at Cooper Union in New York City, a combined equivalent of an Iowa caucus and an appearance on “Oprah.” Lincoln’s issue was whether the federal government could regulate slavery in the territories—the unsettled interior of the continent, not yet divided into states. The Supreme Court (in the Dred Scott decision) had said no; Lincoln said yes. At Cooper Union, he spent half his debut talk examining what the 39 signers of the Constitution thought about federal regulation of territorial slavery. He concluded that 21 of them, including George Washington, agreed with him (perhaps 2 disagreed, and 16 had no provable opinion). He wrapped himself in Washington: We “sustain his policy … you [that is, the supporters of slavery] repudiate it.”

Lincoln won the election; the Civil War began. In 1863, in the Gettysburg Address, he wrapped the Union cause in two founding documents. The first was the Declaration of Independence, the moment (1863 minus four score and seven equals 1776) when Congress stated that “all men are created equal.” The second