Dreams from our Fathers?

Sharron E. Angle, the Tea Party candidate for senate in Nevada, was recently confronted about whether she was too conservative. “I’m sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin…And truly, when you look at the Constitution…you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative.”

Let’s consider that for a moment. The Founders defied the mighty British Empire to establish a radically progressive democratic government in an era of monarchy and autocracy. They extended full freedoms of speech, press, protest, and religion to the masses. And had they lost the war, it is doubtful that King George would have shown mercy for such “conservatives.” Angle also claimed that the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” in the Declaration of Independence, was concrete proof that the Founding Fathers were obviously anti-abortion.

Indeed, Angle’s type of commentary has become commonplace within the Tea Party movement. But although the Founders may have given candidates like Angle the right to say such things, what such remarks really underlie is a manipulative and selfish perversion of American history.

Another Tea Party candidate, Rick Barber, who lost his primary-bid for Congress, went so far as to feature several of the founding fathers in a viral web-commercial. In the ad, Barber explains, to a horrified audience of Franklin, Adams, and Washington, of the tyrannies that are the federal government, the Internal Revenue Service, and healthcare reform. It ends with Washington urging Barber to “gather his armies.” Again, we can briefly forget that the ad offers not-too-veiled support for a violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

Here, Barber goes one step further than most Tea Party candidates and actually puts his partisan political ideology into the founders’ physical embodiment rather than just a self-indulgent interpretation of their words and actions. The founders were not anti-taxation; they wanted fair representation in the levying of taxes. Many of them, led by Adams, were actually in favor of a stronger federal government—especially after the notable failure of the weak central government established in the Articles of Confederation.

Most telling, though, is a quote from the self-proclaimed Tea Party Queen—Sarah L. Palin. Asked about the phrase “under God” in the pledge of allegiance, she replied, “If it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me.” For the moment, we will ignore the fact that the pledge was not written until 1892, and “under God” was not added until 1954, during the Cold War.

Ultra-conservative candidates from Alaska to Florida wrap themselves and their ideas in the founding fathers’ protective legacy. The precedent for appealing to the generally unassailable founders to justify one’s political ideology is well-established throughout American political history, though the breadth and distortion of the Tea Party’s appeal is a unique case to be sure.

But even more troubling than the Tea Party’s blatantly incorrect citations of the history of the founding fathers is the idea underlying these rallying cries: that the founding fathers should be the final word on American democracy. Slavery was “good enough” for Washington, but not for Lincoln. Discrimination by gender and race were “good enough” for Adams, but not for Wilson and Johnson. And American isolationism was “good enough” for Jefferson, but not for Roosevelt. It is one of this country’s principles, its foundational strengths, that each successive generation finds what is not “good enough” in America and sets out to better it. The founders specifically wrote the Constitution to be a flexible and elastic document, able to be interpreted through generations of changes completely unforeseen to Americans of the eighteenth century. In many cases, nobody can truly say what the founders wanted, but it should not matter. They knew their daring democratic experiment would be so much bigger than a handful of rebellious white males. And that great wisdom is the reason why we revere these men.

Jacob J. Cedarbaum ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, is a History and History of Art and Architecture concentrator in Currier House.