This past Monday was Presidents’ Day, commemorating the birthday of our first president and Founding Father George Washington. In recent years, the myth of the founders has eroded. We have come to recognize their imperfections and have struggled to reconcile their relationship with slavery alongside their greater achievements. As a result, the legacy of the Founding Fathers often seems at best a relic of the conservative past, and at worst a tool of far-right nationalism.
On the Left, the past decade or so has seen a wave of historical revisionism, disassembling the glorification of the Founding Fathers and highlighting the narratives of historically marginalized people instead. Thomas Jefferson in particular has come under fire — the writer of the Declaration of Independence and proponent of liberty was the owner of more than 600 slaves. The New York Times’ 1619 Project reimagines America’s beginning at the arrival of the first slave ship to its coasts, countering the 1776 telling whereunder our country was established by a group of elites — all, of course, white men.
A historical canon is meant to be dynamic, so to an extent, these amendments are a crucial adaptation to new facts and contemporary values. Yet despite their flaws, the Founding Fathers had an indelible impact on the formation of the United States. Regardless of our positions on the political spectrum, we should value the Founding Fathers.
The Right seems to have monopolized patriotism itself, and the Founding Fathers are becoming conservative symbols. In actuality, not only were they a politically diverse group who often disagreed to the point of personal grievance, they embodied many of the values of the Left. Despite our current culture wars, Broadway’s “Hamilton” has been a megahit, painting Hamilton’s story as the struggle of an immigrant rising to the top through guile and intelligence. It should not only be in the context of a musical that we celebrate our founders. In the realm of politics as well, they can come to represent in legacy what they did in life: democracy, pluralism and the radical ability to reimagine political institutions.
The Founding Fathers are not conservative, and they are certainly not un-American. In fact, they embody what it means to be American, for all of its flaws and contradictions. They strived to create a more democratic system, even as they failed on many counts to secure liberty for all. They are the essence of progress, not perfection.
Perfection should not be the yardstick for evaluating the past or present. The tragic truth is that the failures of the founders were largely unexceptional — they were typical in the pattern of history, which is rife with injustices of all kinds, including slavery. This fact does nothing to justify the incomparable horrors of our past or absolve the founders for their relation to it. In 1776, slavery was already a contentious enough topic that it nearly halted America’s formation. It is only to say that the Founding Fathers were not uniquely cruel, but conventionally flawed.
Their achievements, on the other hand, are historical exceptions on a grand scale. It is easy to forget, living in the world they established, that the right to religious freedom was a break from centuries of persecution, that the right to freedom of expression was far from guaranteed in the monarchical past, and that the right to pursue happiness was nothing more than a naive ideal. The creation of a republic of this ambition was a revolutionary experiment, one that they placed their faith in.
Taking down statues of Jefferson is not the answer. We cannot excise the darkest parts of our history lest we lose the very foundation of our nation. We should be able to criticize the Founding Fathers while honoring their accomplishments. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
Our nation is flawed, and we have the ability to make it otherwise. The failings of our Founders should serve as an ever-present reminder that the same men who have the capacity for greatness have the capacity for great wrong, a reminder that we must constantly seek to be touched by the better angels of our nature. Their fallibility does not negate what we owe them: the preservation of a legacy that we intend to revise, of values we intend to build upon. We owe them the continued attempt to build a union not perfect, but more perfect, a project that will not progress if we cannot reconcile the differences between ourselves and our past.
ARIANE DE GENNARO is a sophomore in Branford College. Her column “For Country, For Yale” provides “pragmatic and sometimes provocative perspectives on relevant issues in Yale and American life.” Contact her at ariane.degennaro@yale.edu.
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