RON CHERNOW
Author, Titan: The life of John D. Rockefeller Sr., and an upcoming book on Alexander Hamilton
For me, Hamilton is very much the messenger from the future. He lives at a time when the country is overwhelmingly rural, and he introduces a vision of society that is strikingly different, a society that was more urban, much more oriented toward manufacturing and had an advanced system of banks, credit and stock exchanges. To people at the time this all seemed wildly radical and even frightening. The start of Wall Street was really in trading the securities that Hamilton issued, the government bonds that he issued in order to fund the debt left over from the Revolution. But this is all at the very infancy of finance.
What happened over the past 200 years is that American has slowly and inexorably developed into the society that Hamilton foresaw with what now seems like amazing prescience. So he's been vindicated. We now have Hamilton's future much more than Jefferson's. His position among the founding fathers is unique because he straddled the two great revolutions going on in the 18th century—the democratic revolution and the capitalist revolution.
J. A. LEO LEMAY
Professor of English, University of Delaware, and author, Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective
Every member of the Constitutional Convention was more of a believer in hierarchy than was Franklin. Franklin is the most radical of them in this way ... The movement was to make the ability to vote have property attached to it. Franklin led the movement against that and of course prevailed.
Franklin and Jefferson and Adams were all geniuses. And there's no question that George Washington was a person of great ability and of extraordinary character. Now how many of our Presidents do we really think are like one or the other? ... Most of the Presidents, they simply don't compare with these four great leaders.
EDMUND S. MORGAN
Author, Benjamin Franklin
It was Washington's great ability to know when to say no that was very important in the success of the revolution. He was not a great field general, in the sense that he never won a great battle. The siege of Yorktown was his only military success. His only real success was in keeping the Continental Army alive. He did that by refusing to send detachments to places that were in immediate danger and wanted help. It made him very unpopular. His really crucial refusal was to refuse to take the power that his officers would have liked to thrust upon him when the war was over. He did not do a(n Oliver) Cromwell. The U.S. government was a total mess when the war ended. And Washington's officers, who fought this war for independence, said, "We need someone to take charge see that the union survives," and so on. And he said, "Nothing doing." He would have nothing to do with assuming civil power because he was a military hero.
PAULINE MAIER
Author, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence; currently working on a book on the ratification of the federal Constitution
What's wonderful about John Adams is his attitude toward the deification of the Founders, which was one of immense skepticism. The reinterpretation of the Founders as somehow a special species of human beings akin to religious figures came in after the War of 1812, but John Adams lived to see it, and being an outspoken man, he criticized it. He said, "You know, I don't recognize these people." He particularly execrated the cult of Washington. The idea was that they were human beings, not religious figures. He had the grace to say to a young American, "I'll let you in on a big secret: I don't think my generation was any better than yours."
[Yet] these were the people who laid down the basis for the institutions under which we now live. They managed to carry off a revolution that ended not in more carnage but in peace and in a constitutional order. This is a historical wonder.
How do you think they would take to a country in which the Supreme Court chooses the next President? In their craziest fantasies, the anti-Federalists never thought this would be possible—that Congress doesn't assiduously guard the right to declare war. They would find what came of the institutions they defined bewildering.
BILL O'REILLY
Host of The O'Reilly Factor and author, The O'Reilly Factor and The No Spin Zone
When the founding fathers structured the country, they realized that they did not have enough power in Philadelphia to supervise such a vast area. They could not supervise it on the federal level. So they took great pains, led by Franklin, Madison and Jefferson (and Madison and Jefferson are not perceived to be religious-oriented people)—they took great pains to emphasize that the American philosophy had to include "fear of God." This is in all of their correspondence; they open everything with a prayer. There was this constant emphasis on "We're being guided by God." Why did they do that? The reason was that they all believed it would be chaos in the U.S. if people were not operating out of right and wrong, because they just didn't have enough power to supervise bad behavior. So they came to the conclusion that if people feared wrongdoing because they'd be punished by God, that would be best for the country.
Today we have done a 180 on that, because today people have lost sight of the reason why the founding fathers wanted this incorporated into everyday life—they wanted spirituality incorporated. They didn't want a religion imposed, because that's what they had fled in Europe. These weren't stealth politicians. They were pretty straightforward guys. Most of them were ordinary thinkers; there weren't a lot of great thinkers. They were just guys who were trying to get a government off the ground. They'd be horrified at what we've become. What we have now is a bunch of greedy people who are trying to exploit the system rather than improve the system.
BILL BRADLEY
Former U.S. Senator; author, The Journey from Here
You can't say how the founding fathers would react to the government without asking, "How would they react to American society?" None of them would even be able to have dreamed of America today. The only thing to say is that they knew that the future was uncertain, and they had the genius to design a system that is still as resilient today as it was at the time that they wrote the Constitution. And to me, that's the important point. People in America always say, "Well, you know, things are terrible, blah blah blah." Yeah, but there is within the structures of the Constitution and its dialogue with the Declaration the capacity to renew and reform and solve any problem through the democratic process.
ROBERT P. GEORGE
Director, James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University
Very often people will say that the system put into place by the Founders in the 18th century was great for the 18th century but that it doesn't work for the post-industrial Internet information-age world. If James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and even Benjamin Franklin were back today, their judgment would be the opposite. These are great geniuses of political science: one of the interesting things about the U.S. founding is that it's an achievement of political science.
The Founders had a circle to square. The old problem of political theory was how to create a central government sufficiently powerful to advance the interests of the nation both domestically and internationally (and) yet at the same time constrained in ways that would prevent that government from becoming tyrannical. The great insight of the U.S. Founders was the concept of a central government of delegated and therefore limited powers—sharing authority with state governments, which exercised general jurisdiction and whose powers were not merely derivative of the central government. That's a genuinely original piece of political science.
BERNARD BAILYN
Author, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders
The founding fathers matter today because they changed the course of history. In devising the forms of our public institutions, they thought long and hard about the problem of power—the power of the state, of the government—and how to protect the individual's liberties from the necessary powers of government. It came up first in their resistance to what they believed was the growth of autocratic power in Britain and in justifying rebellion against it. It came up in the writing of the first state constitutions. And it came up above all in writing and ratifying the Constitution.
The debate on the Constitution, which lasted for almost a year, was one of the greatest struggles over the principles of power and liberty ever recorded. And the result of that debate was that you could not properly have a bill of powers (which is what the Constitution is) without joining to it a bill of rights. That balance between the two—between powers and liberties—is the heart of their thinking, and if there is anything more relevant to our problems today, I don't know what it is.
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