Our flawed, millennial founders

This Sunday, September 17, 2017, is the 230th anniversary of the signing of the original version of the U.S. Constitution, to be submitted to the people for ratification. The debates over ratification, and the behavior of politicians during the terms of our early presidents can inform some of today’s claims about “constitutional crises” and about the adequacy of the millennial generation to govern the nation they are inheriting.

Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743. He was 32 when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Thirty-two. Today, he would be a millennial. Jefferson was 45 and minister to France in the summer of 1787, while his good friend, also a slave owner of millennial age, Jams Madison did the work that earned him the sobriquet “father of the Constitution.”

In fact, most of the men who fought in the Revolution, and most who labored through the long hot summer of 1787 to write the Constitution, were in the age range of today’s millennials. Yes, there were elders, like Benjamin Franklin involved. George Washington was 55 when he presided over the Constitutional Convention. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, were, respectively, 32 and 36 when they wrote the Federalist Papers, articulating innovative concepts of government, without the need for royal leadership.

It didn’t take long for the compromises memorialized in the Constitution to be tested. Jefferson had not participated in that long hot summer in Philadelphia. When he returned from France, full of enthusiasm for the revolution there, he found a society wrestling with questions about how to implement the new government while preserving the liberties for which individual colonies had revolted against the English king.

Merchants in northern states sought international trade and the banking and government structures that make such trade possible. States whose economies rested on agriculture wanted to be able to export crops and natural resources, but did not want the expense of government infrastructure. And like farmers throughout history, they feared banking and the oppression that so often accompanies it. Dividing along lines of those who wanted to build a strong, internationally involved nation and those who wanted to continue farming and resource extraction, the first political parties emerged during George Washington’s presidency.

The party that wanted a strong federal government, with the ability to pay off the massive war debt left from the Revolution, were the Federalists. The party that wanted a weak federal government, and states with the ability to ignore federal authority were the Republicans.

As has happened many times through our national history, the rhetoric of each party shifted according to circumstances. Emergencies that confronted the nation were as effective at changing politicians’ tunes as was the acquisition of power. Jefferson railed constantly about Federalist overreach while Washington was president. But when Jefferson became president he eagerly embraced the same ‘authoritarian’ powers he had spent years condemning.

Jefferson was the Republican president who first sent the U.S. Navy to confront the Barbary Pirates, who had been preying on U.S. merchant ships. But before he became president, as a Republican he had stridently opposed the creation of the U.S. Navy. As the Federalist presidents Washington and Adams sought to create a Navy and Army to respond to Napoleon’s seizures of U.S. merchant ships, the Republicans lobbied against funds for those agencies.

Our statues and portraits of the 18th century founders of our nation show them dressed in silks and lace and posing as serious, dedicated statesmen. Yet newspapers and pamphlets of the day reveal them to have shared, and even pioneered styles of politics about which people complain today.

Alexander Hamilton worked in the New York merchant community, and was very attentive to the needs of merchants and other businessmen. As our first treasury secretary, he created the first national bank, and systems for controlling and taxing imports. For his efforts, he suffered constant claims of financial mismanagement from a Republican controlled congress. During the early 1790s, Hamilton’s alleged corruption and mismanagement was under virtually constant investigation by congressional committees.

And as with more recent congressional investigations, the results were repeated findings that there was no impropriety in any of Hamilton’s management. Having investigated, and determined that Hamilton was blameless, his Republican critics continued to repeat the claims that their own investigations had disproven, and added to them claims about Hamilton’s personal moral failings.

As with our current president, during his first campaign for the presidency, Thomas Jefferson heaped charges of corruption on the outgoing administration. Once in office, with access to all the information available in government records, he was unable to identify the widespread corruption against which he had campaigned. And like our current president, he continued many of the policies of the preceding administration that he had so thoroughly traduced.

Our founding fathers wrote about the dangers of parties or factions. Then they formed parties in the first years of the first presidential administration. They lamented rude language and ad hominem attacks. Then they lavished intentionally false claims of corruption and immorality on the Federalists, because they couldn’t articulate viable policies for running the government more effectively than the Federalists.

As we reflect on the 230th birthday of our Constitution, we might do well to remember that it was formed by men (no women) who had affairs, cheated in business, owned slaves and practiced religious intolerance. Yet they created an entirely new, stable government that has survived men who sought to recreate royalty or military rule. They created a new governing structure that allowed society to evolve from quill pens to computer tablets and speech recognition, to survive world wars, a Civil War, and religious and civil unrest, without resorting to coups or military revolts.

Two hundred and thirty years later, our government works because its structure includes the tools to overcome efforts to subvert it. When asked, on September 18, 1787, what the new government was, Ben Franklin said “A republic, if you can keep it.” We have kept it for 230 years, not simply because the structure includes the tools, but because each new generation has been willing to take up and use those tools.