Even America’s Founders Were Disillusioned With America
A historian explains what it means that Washington, Jefferson, Adams and others had deep doubts about their democratic experiment.
Do they look happy?
Photographer: MPI/Archive PhotosBefore he died in 1799, George Washington wrote that his young nation had become so poisoned by partisanship that if Republicans ran a broomstick for office and called it “a true son of liberty,” the stick would “command their votes in toto!” Declaring himself “gloomy in the extreme,” Alexander Hamilton confided to a fellow Federalist in 1795 that the cause of good government in the U.S. had been put to the test — with “the verdict against it.”
In 1776, before his doubts deepened and calcified, John Adams was already alarmed at the pervasiveness of “so much Rascallity, so much Venality and Corruption, so much Avarice and Ambition, such a rage for Profit and Commerce among all Ranks and Degrees of Men even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic.” As for the author of the Declaration of Independence, toward the end of his life Thomas Jefferson was a cranky old fellow prone to mouthing talking points of a slaveocracy.