This is a good article, although I have a different perspective on our Founding Fathers than the writer. I don’t see them as being flawed as such. Sure, the times were different and with those differences came certain ideological and social injustices, most notably the possession of slaves, which is undoubtedly revolting to say the least. But slavery notwithstanding, these men were no more corrupt than today’s politicians, and they held certain qualities that today’s political leaders severely lack – most notably a pair of balls.
While it is obvious that mankind has not intrinsically changed in the last two hundred-plus years, there is no doubt that our society has changed dramatically. Ours is a pathetically politically correct and hypocritical society. And unlike Thomas Jefferson and others back in the day, politicians these days are pussies; the whole lot of them. They basically grovel before the ignorant masses, telling them whatever they want to hear just to get their vote, instead of standing firm and being true to themselves and the electorate. For example, there isn’t one politician these days that would have the testicles to stand up and say, as Jefferson did, that he doesn’t believe the absurd claims of Christianity. Yet no doubt there are countless individuals with political aspirations that feel just as Jefferson did in this regard. I use religion as an example because ever since the born-again Jimmy Carter became President this country has steered down the path of orthodoxy to the point that people will vote for an individual, such as George W. Bush, simply because he professed to being a devout Christian, regardless of his obvious shortcomings.
Now we have Michele Backmann (an evangelical Christian) and Mitt Romney (a Mormon) leading the way as Republican presidential hopefuls, and this is all well and good. What is not well and good is that once again, in order to have any legitimate chance at being elected president, or any other high-ranking political position for that matter, requires that the candidate claim a belief in God; whether true or otherwise. Not only is this hypocritical, it is also gutless.
Thomas Jefferson was certainly not perfect, but unlike today’s politicians, he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. TGO
Refer to story below. Source: The Daily Beast
By Simon Schama, The Daily Beast –
The Constitution’s framers were flawed like today’s politicians, so it’s high time we stop embalming them in infallibility.
From Left: Paintings of Alexander Hamilton, Paul Revere, and Thomas Jefferson.
He may have written the Declaration of Independence, but were he around today Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t have a prayer of winning the Republican nomination, much less the presidency. It wouldn’t be his liaison with the teenage daughter of one of his slaves nor the love children she bore him that would be the stumbling block. Nor would it be Jefferson’s suspicious possession of an English translation of the Quran that might doom him to fail the Newt Gingrich loyalty test. No, it would be the Jesus problem that would do him in. For Thomas Jefferson denied that Jesus was the son of God. Worse, he refused to believe that Jesus ever made any claim that he was. While he was at it, Jefferson also rejected as self-evidently absurd the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection.
Jefferson was not, as his enemies in the election of 1800 claimed, an atheist. He believed in the Creator whom he invoked in the Declaration of Independence and whom he thought had brought the natural universe into being. By his own lights he thought himself a true Christian, an admirer of the moral teachings of the Nazarene. It had been, he argued, generations of the clergy who had perverted the simple humanity of Jesus the reformer, turned him into a messiah, and invented the myth that he had died to redeem mankind’s sins.
All of which would surely mean that, notwithstanding his passion for minimal government, the Sage of Monticello would have no chance at all beside True Believers like Michele Bachmann. But Jefferson’s rationalist deism is not the idle makeover of liberal wishful thinking. It is incontrovertible historical fact, as is his absolute determination never to admit religion into any institutions of the public realm.
So the philosopher-president whose aversion to overbearing government makes him a Tea Party patriarch was also a man who thought the Immaculate Conception a fable. But then real history is like that—full of knotty contradictions, its cast list of heroes, especially American heroes, majestic in their complicated imperfections.
Take another of the Founders routinely canonized in the current fairy-tale version of American origins that passes muster for history by those who don’t actually read very much of it: Alexander Hamilton. Outed by the Andrew Breitbart of his day, James Thomson Callender, for having had an “amorous connection” with the married Maria Reynolds, Hamilton responded by making an unapologetic preemptive confession—insisting that since on the truly serious issue of whether he had profited from the management of public finances he was innocent, the rest was nobody’s business but his own. Callender retorted that Hamilton had owned up to the sexual impropriety as a cover for the more serious financial one.
True history is the enemy of reverence. We do the authors of American independence no favors by embalming them in infallibility, by treating the Constitution like a quasi-biblical revelation instead of the product of contention and cobbled-together compromise that it actually was. Even the collective noun “Founding -Fathers” planes smooth the unreconciled divisiveness of their bitter and acrimonious disputes. History is a book of chastening wisdom to which we ought to be looking to deepen our understanding of the legitimate nature of American government—including its revenue-raising power, an issue that deeply captivated the antagonized minds of that first generation. But unfortunately, there is little evidence of citizens engaging in close, critical reading of The Federalist Papers, of the debates surrounding constitutional ratification, or of the dispute that pitted Hamilton and James Madison against Patrick Henry over what was at stake in Congress’s authority to make laws “necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the…Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States.”
Instead of knowledge, we have tricorn hats. Staring at a copy of the Constitution in the National Archives and making promotional pilgrimages to revolutionary New England didn’t prevent Sarah Palin from butchering the truth of Paul Revere’s ride, turning it into some sort of NRA advisory to the British to keep their gosh-darned hands off American firearms.
Facts, as John Adams insisted when defending British redcoats after the Boston Massacre, “are stubborn things.” He would be horrified by the regularity with which American history is mangled in the interests of confirming prejudices. It matters when Glenn Beck’s guest Andrew Napolitano pins the responsibility for the 17th Amendment, instituting direct election of senators, on a Wilsonian plot against American liberties, rather than the proposal of a Republican senator in 1911 that was approved by Congress before Wilson ever set foot in the White House. It matters when Bachmann mischaracterizes the Founding Fathers as working “tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” What made the Constitution acceptable throughout the Union was a Faustian bargain that counted slaves as three fifths of a citizen, thus artificially bloating the political representation of the slaveholding South.
With adult history buffs so deluded about the reality of the American past, it’s even more alarming that the National Assessment of Educational Progress recently rated history as the subject at which students are least proficient. This wouldn’t matter if history were just some recreational stroll down memory lane. But it isn’t. In the fiery debates of Americans long dead can be discerned the lineaments of the same core issues that divide us today. Right now, the education that might inform such a debate has turned into a schoolyard shouting match.
As the electioneering rises to a din, those who dare to read history for its chastening wisdom will be fatuously accused of “declinism.” But it is those who reduce history’s hard and honest reckonings to exceptionalist chest-thumping who will be the true agents of degeneration. As one of Jefferson’s favorite books, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, so luminously argued, there is no surer sign of a country’s cultural and political decay than an obtuse blindness to its unmistakable beginnings.
Schama, a professor of history at Columbia University, debuts as a NEWSWEEK/DAILY BEAST contributor in this issue.
You guys….Trying to intellectualize your own spins on this and mean while, the truth is on the surface and all this time it’s quite apparently simple. Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t have a prayer of winning the Republican nomination, much less the presidency for the very reason that Weiner will never be in the White House. It’s got nothing to do with religion or even politics, whether they are politically correct or not. BTW, I am not going to try and be politically correct as I say this. The truth is that Weiner is a scumbag. Oh yeah, we can be PC and allude to mental disorders, sex addiction, sex intoxication, and all that is good for talk shows and stuff, but looking at it from the raw street perspective, a perspective that gives a rats ass about political correctness, Weiner is a scumbag just like any other man that emails, tweets, or posts pictures of his “hard on” dick to young girls on the internet – he is a scumbag, plain and simple. And Jefferson, omg – SCUMBAG! SCUMBAG! – at a level that only a Weiner can dream and fantasize about. To be a married man of his stature, on one of the highest rungs in the ladder of the game he’s playing, and be repeatedly fucking some poor teenage slave girl – SCUMBAG! My friends, all this “holding in high regards” that we shower our so called founding fathers with, is one big crock of shit. To have first become founding fathers, those men had to be traitors, guilty of the crime of treason. Lets say the Branch Davidians win – either through force or negotiated settlements – their sovereign independence from this country, a hundred years or so from now, David Koresh would be praised as their founding father and worshiped for a fantastic constitution that I am sure he would have penned for them (maybe not penned because of modern day word processors).
I thought I got it before, but now I am starting to truly “get” William Shakespeare’s words in Macbeth about life – Mans Life: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
This nugget of knowledge I got from Wiki was enlightening:
Ants will enslave other ants, keeping them captive and making them do work for the colony.
Quite a few ant species will take captives from other ant species, forcing them to do chores for their own colony. Some honeypot ants will even enslave ants of the same species, taking individuals from foreign colonies to do their bidding. Polyergus queens, also known as Amazon ants, raid the colonies of unsuspecting Formica ants. The Amazon queen will find and kill the Formica queen, then enslave the Formica workers. The slave workers help her rear her own brood. When her Polyergus offspring reach adulthood, their sole purpose is to raid other Formica colonies and bring back their pupae, ensuring a steady supply of slave workers.
I guess the difference between the ants and us is, obviously, there are no idiots in the ant universe to tell the tale.
Couldn’t it also be argued though that Jefferson lacked the guts to take a firm moral stand on slavery. In all of his writings and private correspondence he was quite open about the fact that he thought it was wrong but when friends pressed him to take the lead on this issue in the national debates he repeatedly refused to. The same goes for many of the Founding Fathers. There were some though like Benjamin Franklin who quite openly campaign against it.
Well, there’s another angle to this (and of course I’m only speculating). Maybe your point proves just how much guts Jefferson had. The fact that he believed that slavery was wrong and actually documented it, but yet still kept slaves may prove that he didn’t care what the general population believed. He may have avoided the issue publicly altogether as you say, but it wasn’t as if he folded to public pressure and campaigned against slavery. He kept slaves and everyone knew it.
Anyway, my whole point was that as a society we’ve become hypocritical beyond belief. We set these lofty goals for our political leaders, goals that we as individuals for the most part don’t live up to ourselves, then when people such as Bill Clinton or Anthony Weiner fail, we’re ready to crucify them. I’m not sure if this attitude began with our politicians who wanted to project themselves as holier than thou, or whether society basically almost forced them to play along and pretend to be morally “perfect”. But I suppose it doesn’t really matter; it is what it is. And what it is is a nation of spineless political leaders placating the ignorant and hypocritical masses in order to get their support. And nowhere is this more evident than in the sphere of religion.
I shall expand on my comment of Thomas Jefferson being a scumbag (see comment below) and at this point, I won’t group the rest of our founding fathers with Jefferson and state that they were also scumbags but they did all belong to one specific group:
To intelligently discuss my point, it is first necessary to understand the definition of “Traitor” as one who betrays one’s country, a cause, or a trust, especially one who commits treason.
Miriam-Webster’s online Dictionary defines Traitor as:
1 : one who betrays another’s trust or is false to an obligation or duty
2 : one who commits treason
Since Traitor seems to be closely tied to “Treason” let’s look at that definition:
1 : the betrayal of a trust :
2 : the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign’s family
About Treason in Wikipedia:
In law, treason is the crime of disloyalty to one’s nation or state. A person who betrays the nation of their citizenship and/or reneges on an oath of loyalty and in some way willfully cooperates with an enemy, is considered to be a traitor.
Oran’s Dictionary of the Law (1983) defines treason as: “…a citizen’s actions to help a foreign government overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure the [parent nation].” In many nations, it is also often considered treason to attempt or conspire to overthrow the government, even if no foreign country is aided or involved by such an endeavour.
Thus my point, that any and all revolutionaries would have to be considered, and were, Traitors, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and all the rest of our founding fathers. All were born under the rule of the British empire and rebelled against it’s authority.
Yet they are considered “Heroes”.
Reading a history book is more akin to reading a Bible and nothing like reading a textbook on Trigonometry or Calculus, or checking the data on the periodic table of the elements. Apparently the charge of “Traitor”, and the writing of a nation’s history, depends upon which side wins.
So, that said, not only would I not argue that Jefferson lacked the guts to take a firm moral stand on slavery, I would never have expected he or any of the founding fathers to have done that since they weren’t exactly men of high moral values.
No personal bias or beliefs in my words, just pure unadulterated logic from a free-thinking man
I disagree with your commentary with regard to being a traitor. If one lives in a tyrannical society (take your pick as there are dozens upon dozens of them) and attempts to either break away from that society or fights against it; I don’t consider that as being a traitor. For example, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, etc. – these were all tyrants and criminals who ruthlessly killed their own countrymen. If an individual or group of individuals had risen up against these people and the oppressive systems which they established (which they did) these dissenters would not be considered traitors. Naturally, they would be considered traitors by their corrupt governments, yet nevertheless they are not traitors. It all depends on who (or what) one is rebelling against. Our Founding Fathers were rebelling against an oppressive system and not a democratic one; quite the opposite. As such, they were not traitors.
You can disagree all you want but if it’s raining, it’s raining.
You my friend, are a product of what you have read and been taught, and because of who you are, will continue linearly with that knowledge. If it is my contention that history is written one-sided ly and with bias, then all conclusions are suspect and if I was a linear thinker, I would say, including mine,
At the end of the day, it was really about money – taxes being imposed by the government in power – and the revolution gave birth to the original capitalist pigs and to the american institutions and corporations that are still running and choking this country today.
Even the colonists them selves were divided:
Loyalists tended to have longstanding social and economic connections to British merchants and government; for instance, prominent merchants in major port cities such as New York, Boston and Charleston tended to be Loyalists. In addition, officials of colonial government and their staffs, those who had established positions and status to maintain, favored maintaining relations with Great Britain. They often were linked to British families in England by marriage as well
By contrast, Patriots by number tended to be farmers, especially in the frontier areas of New York and the backcountry of Pennsylvania, Virginia and down the Appalachian mountains. They were craftsmen and small merchants. Leaders of both the Patriots and the Loyalists were educated, prominent men.
Now, I’m not smart enough an individual to have created this perspective – that our founding fathers were traitors – as an original thought. Because of my argument here, the revolution sometimes divided families; for example, the Franklins. William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin and governor of the Province of New Jersey remained Loyal to the Crown throughout the war and never spoke to his father again (perfect logic: his father is a traitor).
As for your logic fallacy: Great Britain with its English Law legal system – which btw is the system we use, so much for having formed a more perfect union – and its Parliament and King George, have never in any historical account, even a biased and one sided one, been compared and equated to Osama Bin Laden, Kadafi, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Benito Mussolini, El Che, Adolf Hitler, Chavez, Saddam Hussein, or any other monstrous being worse than a fruit cake.
You can disagree all you want and I am glad with the turn out – btw if the purpose of the revolution was to form a more perfect Union, it’s time for another one – but our founding fathers were all traitors and some of them were scumbags also. Funny thing is that committing treason against great Britain is the least of their crimes and speaking of Hitler, our founding fathers belong to the same exclusive country club that Hitler is a prized member of.
Authors such as the Holocaust expert David Cesarani have argued that the government and policies of the United States of America against certain indigenous peoples in furtherance of Manifest destiny constituted genocide. Cesarani states that “in terms of the sheer numbers killed, the Native American Genocide exceeds that of the Holocaust”. He quotes David E. Stannard, author of American Holocaust, who speaks of the “genocidal and racist horrors against the indigenous peoples that have been and are being perpetrated by many nations in the Western Hemisphere, including the United States….
Actually, the colonial interest in westward colonisation, as opposed to the British policy of maintaining peace by designating areas reserved to Native Americans west of the Appalachians following the end of the Seven Years War, was one cause of the revolution.
The wars fought east of the Mississippi (1775–1842) were by the newly established United States with three-quarters of the genocide taking place then.
Our founding fathers were alot of things; capitalist pigs, bigots, traitors, scumbags, murderers, but one thing they were not was, nice men.
We are all products of what we have read, what we have been taught, our environment and thankfully for some; genetics. You are no exception. And while you may try to convince yourself that you are a non-linear freethinker, you are far from it. In fact, your line of thinking is as linear as mine, it’s just that you have chosen a different line. It’s like two downhill skiers fighting to get to the bottom of the mountain. One may pick one line, while the other will pick another, yet both are stuck on the lines they have chosen.
Quite frankly, I really don’t know, nor do I care, whether or not our Founding Fathers were nice men or not. All I know is that they laid the foundation for the greatest country in the history of mankind. Now you tell me, how bad could they have been?
Like a teacher of mine once said, “I got no problems with terrorists, as long as they’re on my side.” As far as specific destinies and their consequences go, it turned real fine and dandy for me so I’m not really the right one to ask that of. Ask a Chickamauga, or a Muskogee, or a Chickasaw, or a Shawnee, or an Apache, ask anyone whose destiny resulting from the America Revolution became genocide. Mine, yours, it turned out fine and dandy for us. Except we are unemployed – it’s time again. VIVA LA REVOLUCION