Why America's Founding Fathers would not recognise the country they created... 

Article by Tom Hercock. Edited by Duncan Robinson. Additional Research by Michelle Brien. 

American history has often taken a radically different course from the hopes and expectations of the men who wrote the Constitution in 1787. In the last issue, we looked at how the size and power of the modern American military would have horrified the Founding Fathers. In this article, I move on to how the partisanship of the modern American system would be likely to equally repulse them, and show that the United States, while seen as the standard-bearer for democracy in the present day, was not intended to be a democracy in the modern sense. 

The Founding Fathers who wrote the American Constitution at Philadelphia in 1789 did not believe generally in ‘democracy’ in a way that we today would define the word. They did not want a European-style hereditary aristocracy to develop in the United States; but neither did they want a system where every man could vote, fearing that allowing men without property to vote would lead to mob rule, the rise of demagogues and to America’s new republic becoming a tyranny. Instead, they mostly favoured property qualifications to vote, and more severe ones to actually hold office (though these were never written into the US Constitution, which left such decisions to the state governments). Most states also had checks on how much their limited electorates could actually influence things. For example, in many states the governor was appointed by the state legislature, not directly elected by the voters. 

The ideal voter, as far as many of the leading figures of the early American republic were concerned, would be totally economically independent, which the Fathers thought was the key to political independence. They envisaged America becoming a society of small farmers and independent artisans, neither group being dependent on the other for employment and therefore free to exercise the vote responsibly without being influenced. These voters, it was hoped, would elect the ‘best men’ to positions of power, who would govern by consensus and for the common good. Unlike Europe, the ‘best men’ were defined on the basis of ability, not parentage, so – in theory – any white man could rise to his rightful place in a ‘natural aristocracy’. This vision of government notably rejected political parties and factions, with Washington railing against the ‘baneful effect of the spirit of party’ when he left the presidency in 1798. However, within only two generations, this vision of elitist republicanism, based on a limited political class, consensus, and natural aristocracy, had been completely transformed, even as the US Constitution remained unchanged.

One element of this rapid change was the effect of the Age of Romanticism on American politics. The previous Age of Enlightenment had given birth to the values that underpinned the Founders’ ideas of republicanism: the idea of an educated elite ruling wisely over the people, for example. Romanticism perceived that all men possessed ‘right’ instincts and could thus be entrusted with political power. By the 1830s, most of the states had either abolished or considerably relaxed their property qualifications on voting (though some were to survive into the twentieth century). At the same time, the Founders’ horror of government by party was turning into what has become known as the “Second Party System”, probably the most polarised period of party politics in American history. 

The problem with government by consensus was what happened if no consensus could be found – which is exactly what happened to the non-partisan government of America’s Founding Fathers. Most leading members of the Democrats and Whigs, the two polar opposites of the Second Party System, would probably not have disagreed with the Fathers that true republican government required non-partisan consensus, but would have (often violently) asserted that the values around which consensus should form were their own, that the other party was an illegitimate threat to the Republic, and if their opponents were given free rein to fully implement their policies, the result would inevitably be tyranny (possibly within ten years). It was this period and the fear that the young American republic was under threat that produced the conspiracy theory as a force in American politics. The party that was first responsible for introducing modern features such as nominating conventions and party platforms to American politics were the Anti-Masonic party, which was formed in 1828 to defeat the supposed anti-democratic influence of Freemasons on government, even accusing the Masons of having their opponents murdered. It is not hard to see conspiracy theories remaining an important force in American political life right until the present day, with the ‘birthers’ opposing the policies of Barack Obama this year. 

With a much expanded electorate and fiercely opposed political parties, election time in the USA by the 1830s was marked by sophisticated and boisterous, occasionally violent and dubious, campaigning techniques. However, one element of the tradition of the Founders had survived – it was rare until well after the Civil War for presidential candidates to do much campaigning in person. The tradition in the early republic was for the office of President to seek the man – presidential candidates were supposed to remain aloof from the business of campaigning. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln strayed only a few miles from his home in Springfield, Illinois, while he was a candidate in the most fateful presidential election in American history – Lincoln’s eventual victory provoking the Civil War. By 2008, the candidates spent months, even years, actively campaigning across the country, spending over $1 billion in the process. 

In 1789, the Founding Fathers would have hoped that their creation would remain an elite republic of independent men, preserved from the grubby business of mass democracy. However, American politics did not develop like that: instead, it rapidly became a partisan and egalitarian democracy, described by journalist and historian Alistair Cooke as a ‘flood of democracy’ that ‘roughed up the symmetry of [the Founders’] new institutions’.

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