disparage their legacies.
After a few months on the job, he let it be known to some of his golf partners that the White House was “a real dump.”14 He prefers to live in edifices that he owns and decorates at will, mostly with icons to himself. Instead, as president he must live with portraits of his stern-faced precursors, including at least six portraits of George Washington.
Trump is one of the noisiest of our presidents, but when it comes to the founders, he prefers to give them either the silent treatment or a gratuitous jab. One such incident occurred in a news conference in September 2018. The storm over his second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, was at its peak.
While dismissing the reporters’ sharp questions, Trump suggested that “if we brought George Washington here and we said we have George Washington [for the Court], the Democrats would vote against him; just so you understand, and he may have had a bad past. Who knows? He may have had some—I think—accusations made. Didn’t he have a couple things in his past?”15
Misdirection and insinuation are among Trump’s favorites ploys. In this case, he impugned the father of the nation, leaving the audience to puzzle over a rhetorical question that was both snide and murky. As the House of Representatives was preparing to impeach him in late 2019, Trump endorsed an encomium from Fox News’s Lou Dobbs: “He’s got me down as the greatest president in the history of our country, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.”16
Trump has, however, approved of one previous president as a kindred spirit. The White House press corps has a tradition of asking a new president whom among his forebears he most admires. Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s Svengali at the time, convinced him to pick Andrew Jackson, the first antiestablishment president. Jackson campaigned as a champion of the common man and scourge of the corrupt autocracy.17 When the forty-fifth president moved into the Oval Office, he brought with him a portrait of the seventh. Whether by chance or as Bannon’s put-down of the liberal elites, Old Hickory had a special distinction of his own: he was the first president who was not one of the nation’s founders.
Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were present at the creation of the United States. They were, in fact, among the primary creators. The sixth president, John Quincy Adams, had been at his father’s side in Europe during the American Revolution. As a young man, he served as an envoy in his own right and as secretary of state before assuming the presidency.
Those six presidents, along with America’s man for all seasons, Benjamin Franklin, are the protagonists of this book. Their joint legacy has been important in every stage of American history, but it is especially relevant in the current one. The founders put their individual and shared morals to work in the public arena, establishing the foundation of the freedom that is our national birthright.
The Founding Fathers of the American republic valued their own heritage as children of the European Enlightenment.18 The movement emphasized the sovereignty of human beings, the capacity of individuals to reason, to seek knowledge, and to live by ethics based on honesty, tolerance, and empathy.
They forged these high-minded abstractions into tools for liberating their lands and liberalizing their governance. As a prominent American historian, Henry Steele Commager, put it, “The Old World imagined, invented, and formulated the Enlightenment; the New World—certainly the Anglo-American part of it—realized it and fulfilled it.”19
The founders were men of affairs: landed farmers, lawyers, journalists, publishers, preachers, educators, scientists, physicians, and a retired soldier who had looked forward to a pastoral life on the banks of the Potomac River. When they renounced their allegiance to the British Crown, they designed an architecture of governance that the world had never seen.
The founders were not just lighting lamps: they were playing with fire, and they knew it. They were cautious optimists, not utopians. Nor were they saints or angels (most did not believe in such beings). Some of their failures cast dark clouds onto our day and as far as the eye can see into our own future. Race was the most intractable. Four centuries after the first slaves were forcibly brought to British America as chattel, their descendants have had to endure President Trump’s dog whistles, watch him repress their right to vote, and hear him condone homegrown Nazis and other white supremacists.
The founders were not determinists, expecting that the arc of history, by itself, would bend toward equality, justice, liberty, and peace. Realization of those ideals required constant, judicious, and ethical human agency. Progress was fragile, susceptible to human weakness or malevolent strength.
The founders were acutely aware that their unique construct and valiant determination would be sorely tested. They knew that the customary instrument for maintaining order and exercising magisterial power was tyranny. Republics of the past had been fleeting anomalies, favored by idealists but not by most rulers who relied on the state’s monopoly of violence to ensure their subjects’ submission.
In the sweep of history, most of the leaders of tribes or nations or empires were ruled by the grizzly bear’s instincts. Modern dictatorship is not a new normal: it is an ancient system making a comeback.20
John Adams was a fervent student of history and the founder most inclined to prophecy and mood swings. When gloomy, he feared that the republic would last only a few decades. He had trepidations that future Americans would not be up to the job—or, worse, that they might tack toward autocracy. He worried that a full-blooded demagogue could undermine the American experiment.21
A hoary adage defines journalism as the first draft of history. But those who have made history often have had their own drafts. First come the ideas; then comes the debates, often blood-spilled; then the words, first chiseled in stone, later handwritten on parchment; then, finally, the laws and institutions are created. Only when those rules and their means of enforcement have been established does the intended nation become a reality, with a government that begins to function.
The Declaration of Independence was a calculated act of hubris. The founders proceeded as if the United States of America were up and running. But the independence they sought was not yet theirs; it was left to their ragtag Continental Army to defeat the mightiest military in the world.
The signers were determined to wrest their homeland from Britain, but it would take seven bloody, crisis-ridden years to accomplish that goal. The self-evident principles they were fighting for might have been crushed. The founders were trying to do something almost unimaginable, something that would take a long, long time. Their bold, hazardous, and speculative venture needed fervent goals to match the bold chances they were taking.
The Declaration of Independence was meant to sing, to lift Americans’ resolve and courage for what was to come. Moreover, the founders were taking personal responsibility for what they had already done and what they would do if they won the war. Had the revolution failed, they would have signed their death sentences. That gave their moral weight to the responsibilities they passed to their descendants.
The framers of the Constitution, however, had a different purpose. Whereas the Declaration of Independence was a secular psalm heralding timeless truths, the Constitution set perimeters for the inevitable, ongoing arguments about what those truths meant and how to turn them into laws.
The law of laws—the preeminent commandment—held that
