The Cult of the Founders

“Founders Chic” by H. W. Brands, in The Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 2003), 77 N. Washington St., Boston, Mass. 02114.

The Founding Fathers, recently scorned as “dead white males,” are suddenly way cool. And Brands, a historian at Texas A&M University who has contributed to the revival with a recent biography of Benjamin Franklin, warns of veneration’s perils: “In making giants of the Founders, we make pygmies of ourselves,” and perhaps shrink from the bold actions the times require.

The bookstores and bestseller lists have been clogged with mostly adoring biographies of the Foun­ders, notably David McCul­lough’s Pulitzer Prize–winning John Adams, Joseph J. Ellis’s Founding Brothers, and Brands’s own The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Frank­lin, one of three recent Franklin biographies. It was not always thus.

In their own time, the Founders often faced withering criticism. The Phila­del­phia Aurora attacked Pres­i­dent George Washing­ton as “the source of all the misfortunes of our country.” John Adams was derided as obese and tyrannical, Thom­as Jefferson as godless and immoral.

In the early 19th century, the Founders’ reputation was tarnished by their failure to resolve two great issues then facing the nation: slavery and the question of whether sovereignty lay with the states or the national government. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison burned his copy of the Consti­tution and denounced the Foun­ders’ creation as “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell.”

The end of the Civil War brought a surprising upswing in veneration of the Foun­ders. Defeated Southerners felt a natural kinship with them because so many had been plantation owners, like themselves. Northerners viewed this shared respect as a point of reconciliation with the South. As they would in our time, books on the Founders began to emerge. James Schoul­er’s 1880 seven-volume History of the United States under the Constitution painted Wash­ington as a “paragon,” and was no less deferential toward the rest.

By the 1960s, the Founders’ reputation was again in decline. “The sharpest insult was not criticism but neglect,” says Brands. Antiliberal reaction has since helped bring them back into vogue.

Brands worries that the current excessive veneration of the Founders “inhibits action on important public issues.” Why do both sides in the gun control debate, for example, argue endlessly over what the Founders intended in the Second Amend­­ment? Why not just rewrite the amendment? he asks. Why should an untouchable First Amendment stymie campaign finance reform? The Founders weren’t any smarter, wiser, or more altruistic than 21st-century Americans, Brands argues, but they were bolder. That’s a quality worth admiring—and emulating.