{"id":92282,"date":"2021-01-25T07:26:53","date_gmt":"2021-01-25T12:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/?p=92282"},"modified":"2021-01-25T07:26:53","modified_gmt":"2021-01-25T12:26:53","slug":"auto-draft-460","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/2021\/01\/25\/auto-draft-460\/","title":{"rendered":"Today\u2019s Democracy Isn\u2019t Exactly What Wealthy US Founding Fathers Envisioned"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"VOA \u2014 America\u2019s Founding Fathers were among the wealthiest people in the Colonies when they drafted and signed the Constitution<\/a>, and that\u2019s pretty much who they expected to continue to guide the young nation.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was never meant to be a sort of direct democracy,\u00a0where all Americans would get to cast a ballot on all issues,\u201d says Andrew Wehrman, an associate professor of history at Central Michigan University. \u201cThe vote itself,\u00a0they thought,\u00a0ought to be reserved for people of wealth and education, but they certainly didn’t want to restrict all those other kinds of political participation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The\u00a0founders expected the common people, the poor and uneducated, to participate indirectly,\u00a0through their local government, at town halls and meetings and through protest actions like boycotts.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some of the\u00a0founders were particularly concerned about populism and mob rule.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThese were the kinds\u00a0[of people]\u00a0that thought that democracy was a dirty word. Even John Adams said stuff like that. He didn’t want poor people to vote, he didn’t want women to vote,\u201d Wehrman says.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"George<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>
George Washington, president of the 1787 Constitutional Convention and America’s first U.S. president, was born into a landowning family and married a wealthy widow. (Public Domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bruce\u00a0Kuklick, a professor of American history emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, says the framers of the Constitution had a very different idea of democracy than Americans do today.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe\u00a0founders didn’t want this sort of democracy at all. The Constitution is written so that citizenship rights are very, very limited,\u201d he says. \u201cThey worried about democracy\u00a0… It was a bad form of government because once you let everybody participate, then you’re likely to elect a demagogue. You’re likely to have people come to power who appeal to the frenzy of the masses. That idea is long gone.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wehrman points out that the framers of the Constitution saw to it that only one part of one branch of the federal government, the House of Representatives, is popularly elected by the people. The Electoral College chooses the president, the commander in chief selects the Supreme Court justices and, originally, senators were selected by state legislatures.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s another attempt to kind of whittle away at the direct participation of a large group of people in the political process,\u201d Kuklick says. \u201cSo\u00a0there are all these other constraints that they write into the\u00a0Constitution to shore up what they think might be a leaky vessel,\u00a0where too many ignorant,\u00a0poor people get the right to vote.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was only after the 1913 ratification of the 17th Amendment<\/a> to the Constitution that U.S. senators were elected by direct popular vote.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>
John Adams (left), the second U.S. president, and Thomas Jefferson (center), the third U.S. president, both inherited land from their fathers. (Public Domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cClearly, the Constitution was written and enacted to pull back some of the actions that were taken by state legislatures. People like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton thought that the state legislatures and voters in most states had gone too far, that too many people were participating in politics, too many people were voting,\u201d says Wehrman.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

For example, New Jersey gave the right to vote<\/a> to residents who could reach a certain property ownership threshold. This included women and African Americans,\u00a0who were able to vote from 1776 until 1807, when the state restricted voting rights to white men.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey (the\u00a0founders) thought that there were too many voices in the state legislatures, that states were becoming too radical, that they were beholden to the interests of the common man,\u00a0when they needed to be more reserved and more accommodating to wealthy, educated business-interest types,\u201d Wehrman says.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

So\u00a0what would people like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and the other framers of the Constitution think about America today?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think they would all be sort of delighted that the general framework that they created is still in action,\u201d Wehrman says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"James<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>
James Madison, called the “Father of the Constitution” by his contemporaries, was born into wealth and went on to become the fourth U.S. president. (Public Domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And they might even be open to change. After all, they did write in a process for changing or amending the Constitution. They even availed themselves of that process with the ratification\u00a0in 1804\u00a0of the 12th\u00a0Amendment<\/a>,\u00a0which established separate Electoral College votes for president and vice president. The tweak\u00a0kept\u00a0political adversaries from opposing parties from serving in the same administration as president and vice president.<\/p>\n

Even so,\u00a0Kuklick\u00a0says,\u00a0the Founding Fathers would be considered reactionaries by today\u2019s standards.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201c[They]\u00a0didn’t want what came to be,\u201d\u00a0Kuklick\u00a0says.\u00a0\u201cAnd one of the amazing transformations of the United States in the 19th century is that we go from having this very, very limited view of participation by the people in the government, to the one that people just now completely accept as being the democratic way.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although democracy in action today might not be exactly what the\u00a0founders envisioned, money and power do continue to play a vital role in U.S. politics. And, given that\u00a0the vast majority of\u00a0American presidents have been independently wealthy, the\u00a0founders\u2019 aim of reserving a prominent place in government for the rich has essentially been realized.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

VOA \u2014 America\u2019s Founding Fathers were among the wealthiest people in the Colonies when they drafted and signed the Constitution, and that\u2019s pretty much who they expected to continue to guide the young nation.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cIt was never meant to be a sort of direct democracy,\u00a0where all Americans would get to cast a ballot on all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":92283,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-recposts"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92282"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92285,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92282\/revisions\/92285"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}