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by Richard Brookhiser, July 7, 2006 10:05 AM
What would the founders think of North Korea's missile tests?After learning that Alaska ? a remote Russian territory in the late eighteenth century ? was now a part of the United States, the founders would realize that a bellicose, unstable nation was seeking the capacity to strike American soil, as well as the entire homeland of our ally Japan. The founders were familiar with the concept of pre-emptive war. After Napoleon acquired the Louisiana Territory from Spain, Gouverneur Morris gave a speech in the Senate urging the United States to secure free passage of the Mississippi, by force if necessary. "He who renders me insecure, he who hazards my peace, and exposes me to imminent danger, commits an act of hostility against me and gives me the rights consequent on that act." Morris would not wait for a declaration of war, or an attack, to defend himself. But just because something is justifiable does not mean it is prudent. For twenty years, the founders pondered what to do about the Barbary States, piratical Moslems who ran a naval protection racket in the Mediterranean. If you paid them off ahead of time, they let you alone. If you didn't, they seized your ships and ransomed the crews. If you didn't pay the ransom, your people spent the rest of their lives in slavery. The Barbary States were a combination of the Mob and the middle passage. The founders tried every means of dealing with them. The first two presidents, George Washington and John Adams, negotiated. The third president, Thomas Jefferson, attacked the Barbary States by land and sea; he tried regime change, hoping to replace the Bashaw of Tripoli with his more-friendly brother; in the end, he too negotiated, settling for a (relatively) moderate pay-off. The problem did not end until James Madison, the fourth president, sent a second navy, waged a second war, and made the Barbary States pay damages. The founders might say: Take a good look at your problems. Some of them will be with you for a long time. Note The founders are in undisclosed locations, and the Patriot Act forbids me from saying precisely how I am in contact with them, but be assured that I am. All direct quotations from the founders are on the record. In fact, they have been on the record for two hundred
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by Richard Brookhiser, July 6, 2006 9:14 AM
What would the founders think of the World Cup?The founders were not big on team games. Early forms of baseball and football existed in the English-speaking world, but the founders didn't play. When John Adams was a boy, he swam, skated, shot and flew kites, when he was goofing off from his school work. Benjamin Franklin was a lifelong (and excellent) swimmer. Thomas Jefferson told his nephew Peter Carr that shooting was the best form of exercise. "Games played with the ball...are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind." Watching stadium crowds, who could disagree? The devotion of soccer fans and the status of soccer stars would startle most of them. The celebrities of early America were ministers, and military and political leaders. The first American celebrity ? the first man to have been everywhere and been seen by practically everyone ? was the English evangelist, George Whitefield, who died in 1770 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on his seventh tour of the colonies. The second American celebrity was George Washington, who fought in five states as Commander-in-Chief and visited all thirteen as president. John Adams, his hooky-playing days long past, would understand soccer mania, though. In 1813, he wrote his old friend Jefferson a letter about "aristocracy" ? which, to Adams, was not just a social class, but a quality that gave one individual influence over another. "The five pillars of aristocracy," he thought, were beauty, wealth, birth, genius and virtues. Athletic prowess is a kind of beauty, and it requires a kind of genius (as well as strength and stamina). So it is no wonder that athletes are among the lords of the earth. They seem less inclined than movie stars to give their political opinions, but the potential is there. Adams warned against the undue prominence aristocrats have, but he believed they would always have it. "Call this principle, prejudice, folly, ignorance, baseness, slavery, stupidity, adulation, superstition or what you will....But the fact...I cannot deny or dispute or question." How could we shake our subservience to the lords of the soccer pitch? By watching other sports (that is, admiring a different set of aristocrats). Or by turning off the TV. Note The founders are in undisclosed locations, and the Patriot Act forbids me from saying precisely how I am in contact with them, but be assured that I am. All direct quotations from the founders are on the record. In fact, they have been on the record for two hundred
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by Richard Brookhiser, July 5, 2006 9:39 AM
What would the founders think of the space program? Would the founders have gone to the Moon? Would they go on to Mars? Would they have launched the shuttle Discovery? Although Benjamin Franklin was the only founder who was a true scientist, many of his peers were learned amateurs, curious about the natural world. Thomas Jefferson, in his second term as president, sent the Corps of Discovery (the Lewis and Clark expedition) to the ends of the Louisiana Territory and beyond partly for military and political purposes: he wanted to map his new acquisition, and literally show the flag in it. But he also had a romantic interest in the possible discoveries Lewis and Clark might make. All his life, he yearned to find specimens of gigantic North American beasts, to contradict the Abbe Reynal and other European scientists who maintained that everything degenerated in the New World. (Jefferson was over six feet tall, and the Abbe Reynal was, in Jefferson's words, a "shrimp," so Thomas Jefferson hadn't degenerated.) He never found anything bigger than a moose, and the bones of a gigantic prehistoric sloth, but he looked hard. He also looked on the public dime, which made other founders cautious about research for its own sake. Rep. James Madison suggested that the first census (1790) ask a number of questions about what Americans did and how well off they were. His fellow congressmen balked: the new Constitution required them to take a census to count Americans for the purposes of representation in the House and the Electoral College. They weren't going to spend any extra time or money gratifying James Madison's curiosity. Between these two poles ? vision and prudence ? how would the space shuttle fare? The founders would probably want to push the boundaries of knowledge, but the experimental minutiae that the shuttles perform would probably strike them as an extravagance. Note The founders are in undisclosed locations, and the Patriot Act forbids me from saying precisely how I am in contact with them, but be assured that I am. All direct quotations from the founders are on the record. In fact, they have been on the record for two hundred years.
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by Richard Brookhiser, July 4, 2006 9:17 AM
How would the founders judge their handiwork, 230 years after the Declaration of Independence?Many things about modern America would stun the founders: this, and all other blogs; good teeth; a female Secretary of State. Three things would gratify them, and represent the fulfillment of their hopes. They would be pleased to see that the United States had become an empire (nowadays we would say, superpower). They hoped and expected that this would happen, at a time when the country had only three million souls, who lived in an Atlantic strip on the edge of nowhere. And yet George Washington referred repeatedly to the United States as a "rising empire." The first paragraph of the Federalist papers speaks of the country as "an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world." Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, his successor in the White House, calls it an "empire for liberty." None of them wanted the United States to have an emperor, or any other monarch; imperial trappings were as odious to them as they were to George Lucas in the Star Wars cycle. But they wanted their republic to be a country of imperial extent. They would be pleased by the proliferation of media and higher education. The founders were obsessed with both institutions, writing prolifically for the newspapers, and calling for the establishment of schools and colleges, both private and public. Several of them published newspapers (Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton) or started schools (Franklin, Thomas Jefferson). They would not be dismayed at the partisan tone of journalism, talk radio, or blogging; their own journalism was much more partisan. Some of them would be dismayed at the loss of classical education (Jefferson said he would rather lose his knowledge of any other subject than Greek and Latin). They wanted journalism and media because they founded a republic, which depends on an informed citizenry to elect even wiser leaders, and to not slide into monarchy. They would be pleased that there were no more slaves. Many of them owned slaves, and every state had slaves on July 4, 1776. The enemies of the American Revolution mocked them for it: "How is it," asked the English Tory Samuel Johnson, "that the loudest yelps for liberty are heard from drivers of Negroes?" Still, even those who profited from slavery thought it was a bad thing, and some of them took steps to end it. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, two of the three largest states, abolished slavery in the 1780s. Other northern states followed more slowly (New York passed its first manumission law in 1799, and its last slaves were freed in 1827). A few founders freed their slaves privately ? George Washington did so in his will, and George Wythe, Jefferson’s law professor and mentor, did so while he lived. These steps were not enough to end the institution nationwide; that took a Civil War. The founders would be pleased by the result, though some would shudder at the cost. The argument that slavery is a good thing ? John Calhoun said it produced equality among whites ? was the perversion of a later generation. Note The founders are in undisclosed locations, and the Patriot Act forbids me from saying precisely how I am in contact with them, but be assured that I am. All direct quotations from the founders are on the record. In fact, they have been on the record for two hundred
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Guests
by Richard Brookhiser, July 3, 2006 9:09 AM
NoteThe founders are in undisclosed locations, and the Patriot Act forbids me from saying precisely how I am in contact with them, but be assured that I am. All direct quotations from the founders are on the record. In fact, they have been on the record for two hundred years. What would the founders think of the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld? Irregular combatants, like the Gitmo detainees, fared badly in the American Revolution. The largest category were spies: they fought out of uniform, not in regular units governed by the rules of war. When caught, they were summarily executed. A British courier tried to reach Gen. John Burgoyne in 1777, on the eve of the Battle of Saratoga, to let him know that help was on the way from British forces moving up the Hudson River from New York City. When the courier was caught, he swallowed his message. He was given an emetic, which produced it, then hanged. Later, Major John Andre, Benedict Arnold's handler, was caught out of uniform behind American lines. He was wearing his uniform, but he had a cloak over it that concealed it. When plans of West Point, given him by Arnold, were found in his boot, he was tried by the Army and hanged. In the Constitution, the founders gave the lead roles in prosecuting war to the president and to Congress. The president is Commander-in-Chief. Congress regulates the military, defines offenses against the law of nations, and supplies (or refuses to supply) the funds for warmaking. The founders understood that war is a desperate business. In the Federalist #41, James Madison acknowledged that "It is in vain to oppose constitutional barriers to the impulse of self-preservation….If a federal Constitution could chain the ambition or set bounds to the exertions of all other nations, then indeed might it prudently chain the discretion of its own government and set bounds to the exertions for its own safety." How much less can a Constitution chain the ambition of terrorists? Madison went on to say that a "wise nation…will exert all its prudence" to avoid defensive measures "which may be inauspicious to its liberties." That prudence must come from the president and
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