American Dialogue: The Founders and US

Joseph J. Ellis, “American Dialogue: The Founders and US,” Alfred A. Knopf, 2018, 239 pp.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning historian Ellis writes in, “American Dialogue,” the founding generation’s “greatest legacy is the recognition that argument itself is the answer.”  This recognizes the fact that more than two centuries later so many of the founder’s arguments remain unresolved, and that should be OK. The problem today is that conversations and arguments about issues has become nearly impossible.  To fill the void, the Supreme Court, isolated from voters, began to, in effect, legislate.

Pg. 232:  The founders will forever resist exclusive ownership by any political party or ideological camp.  The American Dialogue the founders framed is a never-ending argument that neither side can win conclusively.  It is the argument itself, not the answer either liberals or conservatives provide, that is the abiding legacy.

This book is divided into Then and Now sections.  The ‘Now’ sections represent the author’s efforts to place each following topics—race, income inequality, jurisprudence, and foreign policy—in historical context by viewing them as then and now entries. The ‘Then’ sections focus on specific founders, chosen in part because of their historical prominence, but mostly because they speak with special influence on the various subjects.  Ellis discusses Thomas Jefferson and racism, John Adams and economic inequality, James Madison and constitutional law, George Washington and foreign policy.  Much in the way the founders went back to the Greek and Roman classics for guidance during the political crisis of their time, we go back to the nation’s founders, our classics, in ours. (P. 8).

 History has shown that John Adams was a much better predictor of where American society was headed than was Jefferson.  Also, unlike Jefferson, Adam’s writings and his life were not unlike one another; Jefferson, on the other hand, wrote wonderful stuff but practiced something different altogether—and I do not just mean his slavery positions, or the Louisiana Purchase.  This book has made me want to read more about Adams.

In chapters labeled “Then,” Ellis considers Jefferson’s views on race, Adams’s premonitions about the rise of an American aristocracy and the emergence of a grossly unequal society, Madison’s belief in the Constitution as a “living document” and Washington’s brand of foreign policy realism. In chapters labeled “Now,” he traces these ideas in 21st-century America. 
  

One of the liveliest debates in American history took place in the letters Adams and Jefferson exchanged during their final 14 years of life, between 1812 and 1826 (the two men died on the same day, July 4, 1826, 50 years after declaring America’s independence). In “American Dialogue” Ellis focused on Jefferson’s notion that economic and social equality would be the natural order of American life and Adams’s retort that “as long as property exists, it will accumulate in individuals and families. … “The snowball will grow as it rolls.” Adams’s “prophecy, struck most of his peers as “so bizarre and thoroughly un-American … that it served as evidence for the charge that he had obviously lost his mind.” Adams saw no way to prevent the consolidation of wealth and power by American oligarchs, but he did believe it could and must be moderated — regulated — by a strong national government.

Ellis claims that since the 1980s, the political right has engaged in a persistent, well-funded and “radically revisionist” act of historical fraud, painting government as “demonic.”  For example, remember Reagan’s characterization that “the problem is the government.”  Ellis thinks the Right has been so successful in selling this “extreme version of capitalist theology” that it has, to a meaningful degree, shut down the centuries-old debate about the role of government. The advocates of regulation and economic reform have been shouted down and shoved to the sidelines, Ellis contends, turning “mainstream politics” into “a one-sided conversation, a muted version of the American Dialogue.”

Ellis sees the same dynamic at work in another vast area: the law. The book traces Madison’s “evolutionary odyssey from 1786 to 1789,” an extraordinary period in which Madison stage-managed the Constitutional Convention and the ratification debate, wrote a substantial portion of the Federalist Papers and drafted the Bill of Rights. Along the way Madison parted with his belief in federal supremacy and embraced instead the blurrier concept of dual sovereignty — the idea of a nation caught, eternally, somewhere in the balance between state and federal authority. Madison came to see this tension between states and federal government as the genius of the Constitution: “the great asset,” as Ellis puts it, “that ensured the argument could never end” and granted future generations the freedom to interpret the Constitution in ways that were relevant to changing circumstances. As Jefferson wrote, “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.”

It would never have occurred to Madison, therefore, that the Constitution should dictate every answer or foreclose all debate.  As Ellis argues, the prevailing conservative doctrine of “originalism” is a pose that rests on a fiction: the idea that there is a “single source of constitutional truth back there at the founding,” easily discovered by any judge who cares to see it. As a historian, Ellis takes particular offense at the machinations made by Justice Antonin Scalia in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) — a sophist’s masterpiece of an opinion that concluded the founders sought to arm the American people without limit and without end.

The author clearly, has reached the limit of his tolerance that the founders stood for small and weak government, unrestrained market capitalism, unfettered gun ownership and the unlimited infusion of money into the political sphere.  Any argument about the legacy of the founders has to start with the facts, something we seem unable to do today.

My Notes:

Pg. 4:  Reading history is like expanding your memory further back in time, and the more history you learn, the larger the memory bank you can draw on when life takes a turn for which you are otherwise unprepared.

Pg. 6:  Dred Scott v Sandford (1857): Chief Justice Roger Taney, writing for the majority, ruled that the framers of the Constitution regarded slaves as property rather than persons, meaning that slave owners could not be deprived of their property without their consent, which led to the conclusion that any law prohibiting slavery in the western territories was unconstitutional.  (The Dred Scott ruling made the Civil War inevitable).

Lincoln, on the other hand, came to a different conclusion.  Namely that many of the founders, in fact, sought to limit slavery’s expansion.  A view this author documents as correct.  However, all 19th-century white people, including Lincoln and all abolitionists, believed that blacks and whites could not live together—if emancipated, they would have to be shipped somewhere, even if it was only to the western territories.

Pg. 7:  History is always unfinished in the sense that the future always uses the past in new ways.  In fact, the past is not history, but a much vaster region of the dead, gone, unknowable, or forgotten.  History is what we choose to remember, and we have no alternative but to do our choosing now.

Pg. 23:  Thomas Jefferson’s public role as a rather rarified critic of slavery operated in an elevated region of his mind, which never descended to the ground that he walked and that his slaves at Monticello worked.  He felt that slavery was anachronistic and was an institutional embodiment of a barbaric bygone era, much like the belief in miracles, divine right monarchies, and religious relics.  He saw that slavery was already baked into Virginia’s future.  While serving as the chair in 1784 to the committee charged with establishing rules for the creation of territories and then states in the vast regions between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi acquired in the Treaty of Paris (1783), he produced a thoroughly Jeffersonian document that set three conditions for the admission of territories as states: complete equality with the other states in the union; the prohibition of hereditary titles and aristocratic privileges; and an end of all forms of slavery by no later than 1800. This last provision was seriously considered but lost by one vote.  Had it passed we may have very well avoided the civil war.  (However, I strongly feel that the 1789 Constitution would not have been possible with such a provision still attached.)

Pg. 28:  During Jefferson’s last years in Paris, a fourteen-year-old mulatto slave, Sally Hemings, arrived accompanying his daughter Polly.  Sally’s white father, John Wayles, was Jefferson’s father-in-law, making Hemings the half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife. Hemings remained Jefferson’s mistress at Monticello for thirty-six years, until his death in 1826.  Jefferson had promised to free any children they had and he did free all four as promised.  His 131 other slaves at his death were all sold to help pay his debts.

Pg. 33:  The 1803 Louisiana Purchase for $15 million ($270 million in today’s money) doubled the US size, adding all the land from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico.  This purchase by Jefferson violated his creedal conviction about the inherent limitations on executive power.  Jefferson made one change in the language of the treaty approving the purchase, which described the range of rights enjoyed by ‘the inhabitants of the ceded territory,’ inserting ‘white’ before ‘inhabitants.’  Jefferson could have utilized the purchase as an opportunity to end slavery: prohibit slavery in the purchased territories and use proceeds of land sales to purchase the freedom of the enslaved.  Instead, the arc of Jefferson as a critic of slavery is all downward after 1785.  (P. 46).

Pg. 50:  Between 1500 and 1860 ten-million Africans were forcibly transported to the New World; only 400,000 of these were carried to the English colonies in North America, where slave traders imported a roughly equal number of women and men in order to generate a self-sufficient population that replaces itself.  

Pg. 47:  In all the northern states that ended slavery after the American Revolution, the racial problem could be solved by segregation.  Starting as a trickle in the 1890s, what came to be called the Great Migration surged during WWI, when the reduction in European migration created job openings in the urban North, declined during the Great Depression, then surged again during and after WWII.  By 1970 nearly half the black population lived outside the South.

Pg. 53:  There was nothing strange about the creation of a race-based class system in the states of the former Confederacy after Reconstruction ended in 1877.  Quite predictably, southern states repudiated the racial agenda imposed on them against their will in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.  They re-established a racially segregated society based on the same level of white domination that had existed under slavery.  In some ways, the Jim Crow era was more virulently racist than slavery because under slavery control could be assumed but after emancipation needed to be more conspicuously confirmed by Black Codes, lynching campaigns, and terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

Pg. 58:  In the 1960s, over half the black population lived below the poverty line, and the median black household possessed less than 10 percent of the wealth of the median white household. 

Pg. 66:  America should expect a major backlash as we approach the middle of the twenty-first century.  A truly historic change is already baked into the demographic profile of the US, a change that can be predicted with as much scientific certainty as warming in the atmosphere.  About 2045, the white population will become a statistical minority.

Pg. 75:  Adams rejected what he regarded as the following illusions that Jefferson held of the French Enlightenment: the unfounded belief in the preternatural wisdom of ‘the people’; the naïve assumption that human beings are inherently rational creatures; and the romantic conviction that American society was immune to the class divisions so prevalent in Europe.  The differences between Adams and Jefferson are better characterized by the terms realists and idealists than liberal and conservative, a pessimist and an optimist, a skeptic and a believer.   Although both patriots, they were diametrically at odds over the likely shape of America’s future.

Pg. 81:  Jefferson did concede that Adam’s argument about inequality was true for Europe, where feudal privileges, inherited titles, and more limited economic opportunities created conditions that sustained class distinctions.  However, in America, on the other hand, the elimination of primogeniture and entail and the existence of an unspoiled continent meant that ‘everyone may have land to labor for himself as he chooses.’  Jefferson’s view remained plausible as long as the American economy remained primarily agrarian and western land remained available for settlement.  The history that would eventually confirm the Adams assessment had not yet happened.

Pg. 91:  Adams maintained that there ought to be one Bank in the United States and that a National Bank with a branch in each state.  He felt this should have been in the Constitution.  Adams’s views anticipated the Federal Reserve Board of the Progressives and the banking regulations of the New Deal.  This was all in keeping with his two rock-ribbed convictions: the new financial aristocracy, like all aristocracies throughout history, could not be killed but must be controlled; and the invisible hand of the marketplace required the visible hand of government to regulate its inevitable excesses

Pg. 97:  Adams believed that entrenched economic inequality would create a political oligarchy in America because it had happened in Europe, so it would also happen here.  Adams was the most ardent opponent in the revolutionary generation of the Jeffersonian version of American exceptionalism, always poised to deploy his impeccable revolutionary credentials whenever he encountered intimations of some special, semi-sacred status for the American people or government that levitated above history’s lessons and limitations.

Pg. 104f:  The recent increase in economic inequality threatens the incentive system of American democracy which can survive the existence of a permanent underclass as long as it remains a statistical minority.  But the erosion of the middle class destroys the faith that any hard-working citizen can expect to enjoy a fair share of the American pie.  Since 1980, this implicit bargain has again broken down just as it did in the Gilded Age, just as Adams predicted.  Between 1972 and 2012, after adjusting for inflation, the average income for most Americans declined by 13 percent; it rose by 153 percent for the 1 percent.  According to the Gini index which the census bureau has used since 1947, the US has a higher level of income inequality than any other democracy in the developed world.  The richest 10 percent currently own nearly 60 percent of the wealth. 

Pg. 106f:  The Great Divergence, as the Gilded Age was called, was followed by what was called the Great Compression, an era of relative equality that persisted from 1930 to 1980.  Many, at the time, thought this was the New Normal.  Sadly, it was only an interlude between the dominant norm of economic inequality once the American economy industrialized.   The interlude of relative equality was largely dependent upon government policies enacted during national and international crises, then continued by both political parties in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  In effect, the New Deal and Great Society programs ameliorated the unequal impact of industrial capitalism on the distribution of wealth.

Pg. 107:  There are two reasons for the dramatic increase in income inequality that began in 1980:  political decisions that removed regulations on the free market and reduced taxes on the rich, and economic structural changes in the post-industrialized economy that were generated by technology, globalization, and financialization.   While globalization has vastly expanded the size of the marketplace, thereby increasing potential customers exponentially, it has simultaneously expanded the labor pool, thereby allowing corporations to move labor-intensive jobs to low-wage markets.  Also, technology has replaced factory workers with machines and robots, producing a job shift from manufacturing to the service sector (I have read elsewhere that the American economy is now 80 percent service related).

Pg. 111:  Reagan-era conservatism was a successful effort to dismember the New Deal coalition by deploying the anti-government message to attract three otherwise disparate constituencies: first, southern whites opposed to the civil rights legislation that dismantled Jim Crow policies; second, evangelical Christians disenchanted by the Roe v.Wade (1973) decision; third, corporate executives opposed to the progressive tax structure and federal regulation of the industrial and financial economy.

Pg. 122:  Madison’s Vices of the Political System of the United States clearly lists the reasons for the failure of the Articles of Confederation and the need for its replacement.  States had refused to honor their tax obligations during the war and their pledge to fund veteran’s pensions after the war; they had refused to cooperate on internal improvements like roads and canals and had even imposed domestic tariffs on one another; they had encroached upon federal authority to sign separate treaties with various Indian tribes, essentially stealing Native American land; the Confederation Congress had failed to pass a 5 percent duty on imports, in effect deciding to renege on the $40 million foreign and domestic debt; and all debates about foreign policy were riddled by local, state, and regional interest blocs, making it impossible for Congress to speak with one voice in the international arena.

Pg. 126:  In the 1780s the nation was headed in the direction of a confederation rather than a nation-state.  James Madison’s chief goal in the early months of 1787 was nothing less than to orchestrate a second American Revolution and create a nation-state.  He formulated what came to be called The Virginia Plan which formed the agenda for the constitutional convention.  His most important detail was getting George Washington to attend; this instantly transformed a highly problematic enterprise into an intriguing political possibility. 

Pg. 139:  The American Constitution defied the classical assumption that every government must have one supreme and final source of authority.  Also, a blueprint for a nation-size republic was formed with a framework for debate in which arguments about federal versus state sovereignty would continue forevermore.  This made the Constitution a ‘living document’ that successive generations would interpret in light of changing historical circumstances.

Pg. 141:  The original ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were a thoroughly Madison creation.  He wrote them all even though many were later edited by others before finally approved.

Pg. 148:  In 1792, soon after the first ten amendments were ratified, Congress passed the Militia Act.  It required every able-bodied white male citizen between the age of eighteen and forty-five to enroll in a state militia.  It also required them to purchase a gun and equipment essential to perform their military duties, thereby making gun ownership, not an individual right but a legal obligation. 

Pg. 157ff:  Both Conservatives and Liberals use the Supreme Court to legislate their positions—Conservatives claim they are originalists, finding justification in the founder’s original intent; Liberals claim the Constitution is a Living Document, interpreted in light of changing historical circumstances.  Liberals began the charade with Brown v. Roe and the legislative legacy of the New Deal.  Both the liberal court under Earl Warren and the conservative court under John Roberts contributed to the expansion of judicial power at the expense of the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. Both embraced philosophes granting the Supreme Court almost unlimited power to alter or subvert long-standing legal precedents and social mores.

Pg. 158:  The devotees of a “Living Constitution” could plausibly find reasons to expand a woman’s right to choose, make health care a right of citizenship, and reject all state laws prohibiting gay marriage.  Ardent originalists could plausibly find both Roe and Brown unconstitutional as well as all New Deal legislation that empowered the federal government to regulate the economy in redistributive ways, to include Social Security.  Indeed, it had become received wisdom that the single most consequential power of the presidency was now the power to nominate judges to the Supreme Court.

The political direction of the conservative court became clear in three controversial decisions during the first decade of the twenty-first century.  In Bush v. Gore (2001), the new conservative majority read the tea leaves of a baffling Florida statute in such a way as to award the presidency to George W. Bush, the only time in American history that the Court had exercised that power.  In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the majority opinion by Justice Scalia overturned two centuries of legal precedents to find that the Second Amendment sanctioned the right to bear arms except in the rarest of circumstances.  And then in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), this time overturning a century of precedents, the court found that all federal restrictions on corporate giving to political campaigns were unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment right to free speech.

Pg. 165f:  Scalia when writing his preordained Heller outcome forced him to perform three challenging tasks:  to show that the words of the Second Amendment do not mean what they say; to ignore the historical conditions his originalist doctrine purportedly required him to emphasize; to obscure the radical implications of rejecting completely the accumulated wisdom of his predecessors on the court.

Pg. 177:  The end of the Revolutionary War eliminated the dominant motive for political cooperation among the states.  However, Washington emphasized the common ownership of the western lands as the gravitational field that would bind the states together as a nation rather than a mere confederation.  Without the West, all political energies would become centrifugal; with the West, they became centripetal.  (Without the Western land, there probably would not have been a United States.)

Pg. 182:  At the treaty at Hopewell (1785) with the Cherokees, the American negotiators cited the ‘conquest theory’ as the legal rationale for confiscating Indian land without their consent; Indians had no rights because they were a ‘conquered people’ who had sided with the British in the recent war. 

Pg. 184:  In effect, every Indian treaty was intended as a temporary agreement, destined to be discarded once the edge of new settlements reached Indian borders.  Demography would do the work of armies.  It was really a recipe for genocide in slow motion, and for a more gradual and palatable version of Indian removal east of the Mississippi.

Pg. 186:  During the summer of 1789, Washington worked to achieve two goals: first, to establish federal sovereignty over all state-based treaties, most especially those recently negotiated by North Carolina and Georgia; second, to identify the most appropriate tribe and tribal chief with whom to sign a treaty with.  Washington rejected the conquest theory and instituted a policy of purchasing the lands.  He continued to invest his enormous prestige in a just resolution to the Native American dilemma, but he failed and knew he failed.  He was also convinced that the Indian side of this American tragedy would never make it into the history books. (P. 191).

Pg. 207:  What came to be called the liberal tradition—representative government, popular sovereignty, a market economy, the rule of law—proceeded to vanquish the European monarchies in the nineteenth century and the totalitarian dictatorships in the twentieth. (It is now reversing).

Pg. 212:  The Middle East has become a disproving ground for assumptions about the inevitable triumph of the liberal order (the Arab Spring is a bust).  Control over the direction of American foreign policy has effectively shifted to the Pentagon with the creation of five military regions covering the entire world, each under a senior general or admiral.  This mirrors the fateful pattern of rise and fall that has caught almost all preceding world powers in its web. 

Pg. 217:  Americans need a conversation about three items that were not had at the end of the cold war:  first, the US has committed the predictable mistakes of a novice superpower most rooted in overconfidence bordering on arrogance; second, wars have become routinized because foreign policy has become militarized at the same time as the middle class has been immunized from military service; and third, the creedal conviction that American values are transplantable to all regions of the world is highly suspect.

Pg. 218:  The fate of nations with political frameworks based on public opinion has always been haunted by the specter of charismatic charlatans with a knack for exploiting popular fears.  In our present case, Trump has exposed the deep pools of isolationist sentiment that always lurked beneath the surface in the rural regions of the American heartland, now raised to relief by residents who see themselves as victims rather than beneficiaries of the globalized marketplace America is defending.  (Was defending).  Moreover, the very fact that a person with Trump’s obvious mental, emotional, and moral limitations could be chosen to lead the free world casts a dark shadow of doubt over the credibility and reliability of the US as the first democratic superpower.

Pg. 224f:  The founders made three major contributions to modern political thought of enduring significance.  First, they created the first nation-sized republic (this had been thought impossible to accomplish).  Second, they created the first wholly secular state with no religion assigned to hold the nation together.  Third, they rejected conventional wisdom that political sovereignty was by definition singular and indivisible and must reside in one agreed-upon location.  The Constitution instead created multiple and overlapping sources of authority.

Two conspicuous failures:  The Native American dilemma was a Greek tragedy, in the sense that the problem became intractable and unsolvable once the demographic wave of white settlers began flowing across the Alleghenies.  Greek tragedies are inherently unsolvable for reasons beyond human control.  Shakespearean tragedies are solvable with the right kind of political leadership.  The African American dilemma was of this sort and could have been solved short of Civil War had Jefferson barred slavery in the Louisiana Purchase lands and used proceeds from land sales to purchase the freedom of slaves.

 Pg. 238:  While most Americans know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, few know that it was Gouverneur Morris (from New York) who was the ‘penman’ of the Constitution, even fewer would know who he was.

Addenda:

Instead of talking about Trump’s latest outrageous act, wouldn’t it be refreshing if the media discussed: Gerrymandering, immigration, health care, gun control, a desperate need for a fair and investigative press (I watch BBC), Corporations treated as persons with first amendment rights, etc…