Those who can do, those who can’t whine
American Heritage reviews Joseph Ellis book on the Founding Fathers. John Adams, George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, American Revolution, Valley Forge, Founding Fathers.
This statement in the review particularly caught my eye.
argument can be said to weave together the separate pieces of American Creation, it is that the founding generation had five central achievements: first, they defeated the most powerful military power in the modern world; second, they “established the first nation-sized republic”; third, “they created the first wholly secular state”; fourth, they created a system of overlapping sovereignty; and fifth, they institutionalized political parties, entities that were thought to destabilize republics but that ultimately strengthened the American system of self-government. Importantly, Ellis emphasizes two signature failures of the founding generation, namely, their failure to strike a just arrangement with several million American Indians and to eradicate the institution of slavery.
The Founding Fathers did five impossible things, and like the very spoiled children we are, we never stop complaining about the two impossible jobs they left for us. The Founding Fathers trusted us to use our liberty to solve the problems they could not. That was their gravest mistake, they thought posterity would be better. When we criticize the Founders for what they left undone we are really complaining because 231 years later we are still having the same arguments. It is not they who let us down, it we who have left them down.
