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WWFFD? Who cares?
Let's stop fussing about what America's founders thought, and let our minds
run free.

By Mark Kurlansky
MARK KURLANSKY is the author of many books, including, most recently, "The
Big Oyster: History On a Half Shell."

July 4, 2006

SOMEONE HAS TO SAY IT or we are never going to get out of this rut: I am
sick and tired of the founding fathers and all their intents.

The real American question of our times is how our country in a little over
200 years sank from the great hope to the most backward democracy in the
West. The U.S. offers the worst healthcare program, one of the worst public
school systems and the worst benefits for workers. The margin between rich
and poor has been growing precipitously while it has been decreasing in
Europe. Among the great democracies, we use military might less cautiously,
show less respect for international law and are the stumbling block in
international environmental cooperation. Few informed people look to the
United States anymore for progressive ideas.

We ought to do something. Instead, we keep worrying about the vision of a
bunch of sexist, slave-owning 18th century white men in wigs and breeches.
Even in the 18th century, the founding fathers were not the most
enlightened thinkers available. They were the ones whose ideas prevailed.
Those who favored independence but were not in favor of war are not called
founding fathers. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania — with whom John Adams
bitterly fought in the Constitutional Congress of 1776 because Dickinson
did not believe it was necessary to engage in bloody warfare in order to
achieve independence — is not a founding father. You could speak out
against slavery and still be a founding father, as long as you did not
insist on its abolition, as many did who aren't in the pantheon.

The Constitution produced by the founding fathers lacked the enlightenment
of some of the colonial charters of several generations earlier, most
notably the laws of Pennsylvania that barred slavery, refused to raise
militias and insisted on fair-minded treaties with Indians. Benjamin
Franklin despised these "Quaker laws" of his colony and even published a
pamphlet denouncing the Pennsylvania Assembly for not sending young men to
fight the French and Indians.

To be honest, the U.S. was never as good as it was supposed to be. Perhaps
no nation is. Henry David Thoreau wrote of nations, "The historian strives
in vain to make them memorable." Even in the first few decades, most
Europeans who came to see the great new experiment were disappointed.
Writer after writer, from British novelist Charles Dickens to the French
aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, arrived to discover less than they
imagined. Tocqueville observed of American character: "They unceasingly
harass you to extort praise and if you resist their entreaties, they fall
to praising themselves."

Fanny Trollope, the English writer, made a similar observation in 1832: "A
slight word indicative of doubt, that any thing, or every thing, in that
country is not the very best in the world, produces an effect which must be
seen and felt to be understood." I have no doubt the response to this
article will show an America still unwilling to be criticized. But it is
difficult for a society that accepts no criticism to progress.

Slavery was the most celebrated flaw of the founding fathers, but they also
set the stage for the genocide of about 10 million American Indians and did
not even entirely reject colonialism. They believed that it was wrong to
tax colonists who did not have representation in the legislature, but the
tax, not the lack of representation, was the grievance. They were affluent
men of property, and they hated paying taxes. Ironically, they repeatedly
used words like "enslavement" and "slavery" to criticize taxes while at the
same time accepting real slavery.

The founding fathers were all men of the establishment who wanted what
Robespierre sneeringly called, when his own French Revolution was accused
of excess, "a revolution without a revolution." John Steinbeck noted that
the American Revolution was different from that of France's or Russia's
because the so-called revolutionaries "did not want a new form of
government; they wanted the same kind, only run by themselves."

Yet it is only with anti-establishment thinkers that a society progresses.
The reason that there is always more disillusionment with Democrats than
Republicans is that Democrats raise the expectation of being
anti-establishment when, in reality, both parties are committed to
maintaining the status quo and the "intent of the founding fathers."

But the founding fathers, unlike the Americans of today, understood their
own shortcomings. Thomas Jefferson warned against a slavish worship of
their work, which he referred to as "sanctimonious reverence" for the
Constitution. Jefferson believed in the ability of humans to grow wiser, of
humankind to make progress, and he believed that the Constitution should be
rewritten in every generation.

"Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human
mind," Jefferson wrote in 1816. "As that becomes more developed, more
enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners
and opinions change, with the change of circumstance, institutions must
advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to
wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to
remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

It is surprising that these words are not more often quoted in Washington
because they are literally carved in stone — on a wall of the Jefferson
Memorial to be exact.

So let us stop worshiping the founding fathers and allow our minds to
progress and try to build a nation of great new ideas. That is, after all,
the intent of the founding fathers.