WARNING: SHAMELESS PROMOTION TO FOLLOW
I was sitting there the other day thinking about how Presidents’ Day was consolidated to honor all of our presidents instead of celebrating the back-to-back birthdays of our two most consequential presidents. The consolidation took place in 1968, moving the celebration of Washington’s birthday to a consistent Monday in order to give federal workers a three-day weekend. Many cities and states had also been celebrating Lincoln’s birthday so his chocolate got mashed together with Washington’s butter rum cake into Presidents’ Day. And the focus further bled out to some vague honoring of all presidents. But not all presidents deserve our honor. I can think of a few off of the top of my head. One quite recent …
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But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m actually here to talk about how we think about the founders of this country. We generally think of the Founding Fathers, defined by broad consensus as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. That can bleed out further to include Thomas Paine, Samual Adams, and maybe John Marshall. And further out to a Founding Generation that includes Abigail Adams and Dolly Madison, John Quincy Adams, James Otis, his sister Mercy Otis Warren, Gouvenor Morris, Nathanael Hale, Jefferson’s Swiss-born Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin, and on and on … you can add your own idiosyncratic heroes and heroines.
ALEXANDER HAMILTON: “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master and deserves one.”
Among the six varsity founding fathers, four became American presidents, and the son of John Adams, a founding generation member in good standing, became the sixth. For myself, I consider the consensus and two more to comprise the core Founding Fathers: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Thomas Paine, and Chief Justice John Marshall to comprise the core Founding Father Octaverate.
THOMAS PAINE: Moderation in temper is always a virtue but moderation in principle is always a vice.
Over the last year or so, however, I’ve started to think that instead of spending more time on who and who wasn’t part of the core of the Founding Generation, we should be expanding our conception of the founding of the nation to include the signing of The Emancipation Proclamation, the passage of the 14th and 19th Amendments, and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts and the 1965 Voting Rights as the full embodiment of the Founding of the American Republic as, at least on paper, a full liberal democracy. Thus we need to expand our idea and roster of founders longitudinally rather than laterally.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Afro pick
I would propose that Americans, and progressives in particular, should consider Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, Alice Park and Ida B. Wells and Jane Addams, and Martin Luther King Jr. and LBJ as Founding Fathers and Mothers in good standing and the full equals to Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Washington, Madison, and Adams. If we are to credit Paine and Marshall, then certainly we need to include W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall as well.
It’s tricky business, do we credit the Justices Frankfurter and Brennan who did so much to expand basic rights in America? Do we need to rehabilitate Woodrow Wilson from his fairly recent cancellation and approach him with a bit more the understanding we generally extend to Jefferson or Lincoln … taking their worst aspects in stride while celebrating the best of their contributions? Wilson was a bigger racist than Jefferson and Lincoln with fewer excuses but he was no slouch in expanding American liberal democracy and a vision of a cosmopolitan governance dedicated to peace that eventually became The United Nations.
And again, while we tend to be aware of the figures who belong on your civic Mount Olympus or new Mount Rushmore, the as any study of the revolutionary generation should include Sam Adams and Gouvenor Morris, a study of the full founding of American democracy should include Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and their peers at Seneca Falls, as well early abolitionists like David Walker, Martin Delaney, Sojourner Truth (who, like Douglass was a stalwart of women’s suffrage) and William Lloyd Garrison. It’s painful these days to watch the criminal justice and Black Lives Matter movements largely floundering around with massive support in the streets and so little to show for it, elevating the radical chic of Malcolm X who died without any ties to any organization or practical program of power, reducing Rosa Parks training at the Highlander School and her work at the Montgomery NCAAP to “NAH” on a t-shirt, unaware of the discipline and strategic thinking of the giants of SNCC: James Lawson, Diane Nash, James Forman, James Bevel, Julian Bond, Bob Moses, and John Lewis. Now more than ever a greater knowledge of the lives and ideas of Adam Clayton Powell Jr, A. Philip Randolph, Walter Ruether, and Bayard Rustin would go a long way. I have to think that there’d be a whole lot more direct action and bargaining directed at the police unions for reforms more specific than defunding the police (or ending capitalism). And of course, the other major civil rights of the current moment, the fight to consolidate gay rights and secure trans rights, should turn our thoughts back to Stonewall, Larry Kramer and the fight for AIDS equity, and Andrew Sullivan and the push for gay marriage.
Thinking about the history of the United States through the prism of an ongoing founding to fully become a liberal democracy and a constitutional republic with equal rights truly for all and all citizens members of the beloved community. It pulls out of obscurity players and events that are too often overlooked and necessarily deemphasizes others … do high school kids really need to spend a bunch of time on the War of 1812? This is not a people’s history that I propose, though a great emphasis on social movements and the material and technological conditions that give rise to them is in order. In the course of a few short paragraphs I’ve listed about 50 Americans consequential in America moving toward becoming its best self. A dozen or so are well-known to most of us. The rest are unjustly and sadly obscure. They should be at least as well known to Americans as any number of mediocre Presidents or famous generals. It wouldn’t be asking too much that high school graduates should be able to knock out three to five paragraphs on everyone mentioned here. I’ll admit that I’d have to brush up a bit on Albert Gallatin on Alice Park. That’s OK, a democratic education, like the creation of a more fully realized liberal democracy, is ongoing.