ReadingThinkingAndWriting

The news media today crawls in the sludge of partisan attacks and dirty laundry from which it seems incapable to rise above.  The current trend towards ruthless, and very often baseless, assertions goes well beyond reason and no doubt furthers the media’s descent into pure propaganda.  The stories include:

“The treasury secretary is an aristocratic tool of the rich, using his office to further the financial gain of his powerful friends at the expense of the common man …”  “The former president traded sexual favors from the wife of the candidate to secure votes…”  “The president, described as a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman” plans to name himself king and groom his son as his heir…”

This would seem enough to cause Abigail Adams, a leading figure in the American Revolution to call for a censure on the freedom of the press.  As a matter of fact, it did, as the”hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman” was none other than her husband, a hero of our nation’s founding; John Adams.

These claims were actually made in the press at the time immediately following the founding of the United States, and were, of course, untrue.  The treasury secretary was Alexander Hamilton.  The purported pimp of a candidate’s wife for votes was Thomas Jefferson1; the claim supposedly coming from John Randolph, a congressman from Virginia.  And this was not the half of it.  James Callender, came in from England, aided by Jefferson in establishing himself in the U.S., became the source of tabloid style, political attacks thrown in any direction which opposed the current source of his paychecks.  He even attacked Mr. Jefferson when he refused to give him a government job.

Abigail actually wrote to Jefferson in 1804 stating; “In no country has calumny, falshood[sic], and revileing[sic] stalked abroad more licentiously, than in this.  No political character has been secure from its attacks, no reputation so fair, as not to be counted by it, until truth and falshood[sic] lie in one undistinctioned heap”.

The attacks were not just tabloid style, but fear mongering just as we would find in the media today.  For example, Alexander Hamilton, writing under a pseudonym attacked Jefferson and his party; “Hence it is, in the present moment, we see the most industrious efforts made to violate the Constitution of this State, to trample upon the rights of the subject, and to chicane or infringe the most solemn obligations of treaty; while dispassionate and upright men almost totally neglect the means of counteracting these dangerous attempts.”

In 1798 John Adams received the what became known as the Alien and Sedition acts.  All accounts I’ve read had Abigail Adams encouraging the president to sign the acts into law.  Of interest here is the 4th act which made a high misdemeanor “false, scandalous, or malicious writing”.  However, this one act is often sited as a major cause of his failure to win reelection in 1800.  The new congress that followed repealed the acts and the newly elected president Thomas Jefferson, the man who made efforts to “trample upon the rights of the subject [the people]” pardoned all those imprisoned under the act.

So where does this leave us today?  Are Fox News and it’s less bombastic counterparts on “the left” off the hook given that the tradition of often baseless and even seditious political attacks in the media date back to the nations founding? Does the fact that Hamilton and Jefferson directly employed and encouraged these practices lend them merit?

In my opinion… no.  Madison wrote “A  popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”  Further, “Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.”  In essence, a well educated and informed populace is required, and to understand their work, we must understand these people and the times in which they lived.  Jefferson wrote that ““Information is the currency of democracy” and “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”

In the words of these two men we find what I read to be the caveat in the core pillar of our system of government.  Government of the people, by the people, and for the people cannot be carried out effectively if the people are not well informed and do not prize education.  Any source that intentionally distorts the truth or circulates out right falsehood as truth for some political goal is, in my opinion, acting to subvert the true sovereign recognized by the consensus of the founders; the people.  Do I agree with Abigail and the Sedition Act, no.  But warning labels are used on many products to alert people about the contents, perhaps the same can be applied to the media.  *Warning*: the following program may contain material presented as factual and unbiased, when actually the exact opposite is true.  People are advised to seek other sources before reaching any conclusions.

And it goes further…  What if Hamilton and Jefferson had put aside their anger and sat down together as Washington had requested in letters to both men?  What if the politicians in the North and those in the South set out with the only goal being to work for ends of mutual benefit instead of slashing and burning and the near constant threats to secede from or dissolve the union?

And today, when we honestly ask who among us wants “big government breathing down our necks”, spending our money with reckless, let alone money borrowed from not-necessarily-friendly powers.  I would wager no one would raise their hands.  I would think no one wants high taxes… no one wants our rights trampled.

However, with fear running high, and anger and hatred stoked We The People will never sit down and safely debate the salient questions.  In my opinion, the people involved in creating this country committed an act of historic greatness indeed, but that does not render their every act great, or even the best choice.  Perhaps its time we relegated these worthless practices, that are at once injurious to those people and to the nation itself, to the magazines on the supermarket check-out racks.  If we don’t I fear that we will never come together as “We the People” and ensure that the guards we appoint for our security are actually concerned with it.

1: Cokie Roberts, Ladies of Liberty: The Women who Shaped Our Nation

About a year ago I decided to dive into a study of the  people, events, and ideas that were responsible for the creation of the United State of America.   After reading American Creation by Joseph Ellis and seeing all the fervor in the political climate today drawing upon the founders and their intent, I took to my default course; learning.

I started with Jefferson as he tended to be my favorite of the group and the one, I later concluded who best embodied what I see as the spirit of the nation.  From a few disjoint discussions and quotes I had read I had very high hopes when I picked up a recommended biography and began reading.  Soon my reading expanded to include his letters and autobiography as well a few not so flattering views on the man.

What I found was contradiction; and near the end of my reading, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Jefferson.   During his political career in the fledgling U.S. government he saw himself as a man of the people.  According to several sources, as president, he often answered the White House door and greeted visitors in bedroom slippers.  In direct contrast to Washington and Adams before him, he walked rather than riding in drawn carriages essentially reversing the hints of royal privilege one might see in the acts of his predecessors.   However, he lived on a large estate on the top of a mountain tended to by hundreds of slaves; very much out of reach of “the people”.

He tried several times to introduce legislature to abolish the slave trade and even wrote passionately against slavery in a passage that was struck from his rough draft of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress:  “[King George] He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidels powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold…”  Yet, he “owned” several hundred people himself.

Several historians claim his was disingenuous.  A genius no doubt, but a brilliant schemer with political aspiration disguised with the mask of champion of the people.  I was becoming inclined to agree;  then I realized, he was a human being.  He was necessarily prone to mistakes, influenced by strong emotion, and, most important, not to be written off nor his achievements and wisdom diminished because of his inescapable condition in which we all share.

He “inherited” the people and the plantation and records suggest that those people were born in Virginia.  Records also show that he paid some for more difficult tasks and that some members of his family educated the children despite the popular condemnation of the practice.  So, perhaps he saw them more as members of his community.  Perhaps he didn’t live isolated on a hilltop.  Perhaps, given the apparent economic modalities in the south and the resultant political implications of immediate emancipation he chose his course of driving the phasing out of the practice.  To my mind, this was not the conclusion of a revolutionary for liberty who was for me the soul of the new nation, and there were other courses available which were far more favorable.  However, it is logical that it was the pragmatic compromise of a man torn between Enlightenment thinking and the political ramifications thereof.

This shocking, and yet blatantly obvious, realization led me to reevaluate how I thought about the founders and the documents that formed this nation.  Jefferson did his best.  The apparent contradictions are, to my mind, the expected results of fallible human, engaged in a monumental task, in a very trying time.

I think there is value in statues and buildings named in their honor.  I think there is a place in remembering the greatness of the accomplishments.  However, there is also value in understanding that they were people with flaws just like us.

Today, I would wager, Jefferson wouldn’t stand a chance.  From my reading, in his day, political attacks in the media were seen as just that; political.  Today they are either accepted blindly in an ideological rage, or ignored out of hand in an ideological rage.  The nation’s founding, people searched texts for precedent and practiced arguments to prepare for debate, today marketing firms are hired to package and present positions with little if any substance conveyed.

So, yes, the founders were people.  Humans like the rest of us, however, unlike many today, they were people of substance.  Jefferson may have been big on French wine and dinner parties, but one of his defining legacies was his considerable library.  After the British burned Washington in the War of 1812, Jefferson, in 1814 offered to donate his library to replace the volumes destroyed.   Washington studied the sociology of his day, Madison and Adams dove at length into the ancient republics and the political philosophy of contemporary European and British authors.  In fact, if one was inclined to read the works of the French philosopher Montesquieu, one would find some very familiar ideas including the separation of powers.

Today, instead of thriving in the fruition of the works they accomplished, we are suffering from the retention and inflation of what I see as their failings.  The inefficiency and danger of an ideologically based two-party system.  The barbed and pointless tabloid-like attacks done through party owned news sources now completely unbridled.

Among many other things, it seems we’ve lost the sense of respect for the responsibility resting on the shoulders of an elected representative, possibly because representation and the people are not necessarily on the mind of those elected.  Jefferson said in his first inaugural address ” to declare a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents, and that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge, and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire. ” 

In conclusion…..   The founders of the United States while not perfect and not free from personal ambition, acted largely out of a desire to create something great.  To create something larger than themselves where all people’s lives were respected.  They made no permanent rule other than the establishment of inalienable rights for everyone (eventually).  They made mistakes, but left a way to correct for them