It requires a strenuous effort to read American history, and the words of its great statesmen and dissidents, without encountering appeals to the Founders.
Michael Lind’s “Forget the Founding Fathers” essay is ably dismantled by Jay Cost, but I can’t resist adding a bit to exactly how wrong Lind gets his history. His essay really is a wonderful example of how folks on the Left not only don’t know history but make aggressive efforts to unlearn what they do know.
Lind claims that “the cult of the Founders in its present form is only a few generations old” and that “modern Founders-ism is a relic of the second half of the 20th century.” As Cost notes, if you’ve actually visited Washington, D.C., you might have noticed the Washington Monument (construction of which began in 1848, attended by the son of George Washington’s stepson, the widow of Alexander Hamilton, and the son of John Adams); other famous Founder-revering monuments began construction in 1925 (Mount Rushmore) and 1943 (the Jefferson Memorial). Unlike Britain, which puts its current sovereign on its money, we have George Washington on the quarter and the dollar, Thomas Jefferson on the nickel, Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill, and Benjamin Franklin on the $100 bill. All have been there quite a long time.
The very term “Founding Fathers” was coined by Warren G. Harding in his keynote address to the Republican convention in 1916 — a speech that launched him to the presidency. Lind seems incurious about where the term came from. Lind misinterprets John Adams’s complaint in 1790 about the already present cult of Washington and Franklin; Adams’s concern was that he and other Founders would be forgotten. Instead, when America finally ran out of Founding-era presidents, the first person voters chose was . . . the son of John Adams.
I dealt at some length in 2021 with a similar claim by Patrick Deneen, who misused the Google Ngram Viewer to search for terms about the Founders in old books. As I noted then, “founders of America” and “Founders of this country” both peaked as terms in the first half of the 20th century, “original intent of the Constitution” was in fairly common use between the 1840s and 1860s, “original Constitution” appears consistently since the mid 19th century, “authors of the Constitution” and “framers of the Constitution” spiked quite a bit around the Civil War era, “our fathers” appears even more heavily before 1860, and “Revolutionary fathers,” the term used by Andrew Jackson in his proclamation on the nullification crisis that invoked the Founders, is also heavily weighted to Jackson’s era.
The hagiographic Parson Weems biography of George Washington, the one with the cherry-tree story, was published in 1800. John Marshall began publishing a five-volume epic biography of Washington in 1804 and took three decades to complete both the set and an abridged version. In 1832, Henry Clay began the tradition of reading Washington’s Farewell Address in the Senate on his birthday.
Franklin Pierce was the son of a Revolutionary War veteran who wore his old tricornered hat while he was governor of New Hampshire in the 1820s. Pierce, in his inaugural address in 1853, declared that the “intrinsic” strength of early America “came from the furnace of the Revolution, tempered to the necessities of the times” by men who “wasted no portion of their energies upon idle and delusive speculations.”
Lind breezily dismisses Lincoln: “True, Abraham Lincoln, in opposing slavery and defending the union, followed the example of Henry Clay in calling for a return to the idealism of the founding period.” This is a colossal understatement. Not for nothing did Rick Brookhiser title his Lincoln biography “Founders’ Son.” Lincoln devoted the first two-thirds of his 1860 Cooper Union speech to invoking the authority of the Framers of the Constitution one by one on the expansion of slavery — an approach that followed in the footsteps of the great debates around the Dred Scott decision, in which both sides vied to claim the mantle of the Founders as to whether or not they believed black Americans to be part of “We the People.” Lincoln’s most famous speech of all, the Gettysburg Address, literally begins with an appeal to the Founders: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1859, declining an invitation to a celebration of Jefferson’s birthday, he penned a reflection on the principles of Jefferson. On Washington’s birthday in 1862, he recommended that all Americans read and reflect upon the Farewell Address.
The Confederacy, whose president was Jefferson Davis and whose vice president was Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was no less devoted to the Founders even in spite of Stephens’s call for repudiating the Declaration of Independence. The Confederates inaugurated their new government on Washington’s birthday, put Washington and Jefferson on their stamps, and drew constant parallels to the Revolution for their own struggle. Davis began his own inaugural address: “Fellow-Citizens: On this the birthday of the man most identified with the establishment of American independence, and beneath the monument erected to commemorate his heroic virtues and those of his compatriots, we have assembled to usher into existence the Permanent Government of the Confederate States.” The Confederate army’s leading figure was Robert E. Lee, son of the Revolutionary War hero famed for eulogizing Washington.
Frederick Douglass claimed them, too. His “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” speech, delivered in 1852, placed his critique of America’s neglect of black liberty squarely in the context of the greatness of the Founders and what they did for all white Americans. Martin Luther King Jr. continued that tradition in 1963.
Founding-era names have been ubiquitous in every era of American history. The first figure of American literature was Washington Irving, born in 1783. The Brooklyn Bridge was built by Washington Roebling, a veteran of Gettysburg. Knoxville, Tenn., was named for Henry Knox, one of many places named for Revolutionary War leaders. The capital of Missouri is Jefferson City, founded in 1821. The state of Washington was formed from a territory given that name in 1853. Washington and Lee University was named for George Washington in 1813. Lafayette College was named in 1826. James Madison University has borne Madison’s name since 1938. George Mason University was named in 1959. Even the fictional doctor “Hawkeye” Pierce of M*A*S*H is named Benjamin Franklin Pierce. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
William Jennings Bryan, the first figure of American progressivism, was a devotee of Jefferson. His 1896 Cross of Gold speech at that year’s Democratic convention remains perhaps the most famous and electric moment in the creation of American progressivism. When Bryan wanted to drive home his point about bimetallism, he declared that American monetary independence from the British gold standard was “the issue of 1776 over again,” and he held aloft a 1795 silver dollar, insisting that he was asking only for the “restoration of the money of the fathers.”
It requires a strenuous effort to read American history, and the words of its great statesmen and its great dissidents alike, without encountering appeals to the Founders. If Michael Lind has managed that effort, it is not to his credit.