The natural inclination to simplify public reality to suit private interests is amply illustrated by the attempts of successive waves of scholars to present America’s founders as the standard bearers for one favorite idea or another to the exclusion of all the rest. In the 1960s and 1970s, the founders were credited with laying the foundations for liberal pluralism and interest group politics by establishing a constitutional framework for the competition among a multiplicity of factions. Later, proponents of civic republicanism discovered that the founders put a premium on classical virtue and community and regarded the corruption that came from commercial life as the great enemy of liberty. Meanwhile, higher law and natural rights theorists argued vigorously that the Constitution represents an exemplary modern embodiment of a politics grounded in transcendent moral truths. Most recently, democratic theorists have found in the American Constitution a blueprint for a form of political legitimacy that altogether dispenses with higher law and natural rights.

Just as often, and perhaps more these days, scholars have portrayed the founders as in urgent need of deflating and debunking. Early twentieth-century progressives thrilled to the indictment put forward by Charles Beard. In his great work, An Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution, he set out to overthrow the nineteenth-century idolization of the founders by demonstrating that they had crafted a constitution whose guiding purpose was to advance their economic interests. Recently, scholars have been eager to go much further. George Washington, for example, has been depicted as a bumbling oaf and ineffective military commander who never had an original idea or uttered a memorable word. Another favorite target is Thomas Jefferson, who has been sneered at as a colossal hypocrite who showed his true beliefs by keeping his slaves and using one of them, Sally Hemings, for his sexual pleasure. Nor is there any shortage of angry historians and political theorists blaming the founders for sowing the seeds of American imperialism and preparing the ground for the endless offenses based on race, class, and gender allegedly perpetrated by the nation across the centuries.

The scholarly battle over the founders takes place against the backdrop of — and is fueled by — a larger contest among politicians and the people in America to lay claim to the founders’ enduring prestige and affirm their abiding authority. In this continuing fascination with the "generation that fought the Revolution and created the Constitution," there is something peculiar, observes Pulitzer Prize winning historian Gordon Wood. Indeed,

No other major nation honors its past historical characters, especially characters who existed two centuries ago, in quite the manner we Americans do. We want to know what Thomas Jefferson would think of affirmative action, or George Washington of the invasion of Iraq. The British don’t have to check in periodically with, say, either of the two William Pitts, the way we seem to have to check in with Jefferson or Washington. We Americans seem to have a special need for these authentic historical figures in the here and now.

In the introduction to his new book, a collection of previously published and newly revised essays, Wood observes that our "special need for these authentic historical figures" does not have its source in our concern with "constitutional jurisprudence and original intent," or even in the determination to "recover what was wise and valuable in America’s past." The true source, he says, is the peculiar manner in which the nation was constituted:

The United States was founded on a set of beliefs and not, as were other nations, on a common ethnicity, language, or religion. Since we are not a nation in any traditional sense of the term, in order to establish our nationhood, we have to reaffirm and reinforce periodically the values of the men who declared independence from Great Britain and framed the Constitution. As long as the Republic endures, in other words, Americans are destined to look back to its founding.

Read more…

---