10 Founding Fathers Quotes That Will Make Conservatives’ Heads Explode
Posted by: Elisabeth Parker in Most Popular on AATTP, TEApublican Smack Downs July 4, 2014
Conservatives insist their cruel and unworkable agenda is sanctioned by America’s Founding Fathers. As with their similar claims about Jesus Christ wanting America to oppress the poor and help the wealthy, these claims are blatantly false. The following 10 quotes prove this.
http://aattp.org/9-founding-fathers-quotes-that-will-make-conservatives-heads-explode/
Thought I would go through and source each point, and see if its complete crap or not.
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The Founding Fathers on regulating corporations.
1) “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
Respectfully Quoted says this is "obviously spurious", noting that the OED's earliest citation for the word "deflation" is from 1920. The earliest known appearance of this quote is from 1935 (Testimony of Charles C. Mayer, Hearings Before the Committee on Banking and Currency, House of Representatives, Seventy-fourth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 5357, p. 799)
here:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson#Misattributed
2) “I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
I do not believe that in the four administrations which have taken place, there has been a single instance of departure from good faith towards other nations. We may sometimes have mistaken our rights, or made an erroneous estimate of the actions of others, but no voluntary wrong can be imputed to us. In this respect England exhibits the most remarkable phaenomenon in the universe in the contrast between the profligacy of it’s government and the probity of it’s citizens. And accordingly it is now exhibiting an example of the truth of the maxim that virtue & interest are inseparable. It ends, as might have been expected, in the ruin of it’s people, but this ruin will fall heaviest, as it ought to fall on that hereditary aristocracy which has for generations been preparing the catastrophe. I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
--Letter to George Logan (12 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12, pp. 43-44.
here:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson#1810s
3) “The power of all corporations ought to be limited, [...] the growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.”
– James Madison
James Madison's "Advice to My Country"
By James Madison
larger: http://i.imgur.com/yZRd4yx.png
found here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=-IrnXiH2lbAC&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35&dq=The+power+of+all+corporations+ought+to+be+limited+james+madison&source=bl&ots=m4azgrEiIH&sig=6JApGQKCotB9cvAQB9hNMRE_0m0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LyW4U_jDNIqOqgb02oLgBQ&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=The%20power%20of%20all%20corporations%20ought%20to%20be%20limited%20james%20madison&f=false
The Founding Fathers on war.
4) “He who is the author of a war, lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.”
– Thomas Paine: The Crisis No. V, 1797
here:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine#The_American_Crisis_.281776_-_1783.29
5) “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.” -Thomas Jefferson
here:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson#1790s
The Founding Fathers on liberalism.
6) "As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality."
--"Letter from George Washington to the Roman Catholics in the United States," May 15th 1790.
found here:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:George_Washington
from here:
http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-05-02-0193
Catholics...1790...
my reaction:
The Founding Fathers on religion.
7) “The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
Treaty of Tripoli
Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Muslim] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
~1797 Treaty of Tripoli signed by Founding Father John Adams
more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tripoli#Article_11
8. “We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition… In this enlightened Age and in this Land of equal liberty it is our boast, that a man’s religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States.”
--Letter to the the members of The New Church in Baltimore (22 January 1793), published in The Writings Of George Washington (1835) by Jared Sparks, p. 201.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Washington
9. “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”
~Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Horatio Spofford, 1814
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson
The Founding Fathers on taxes.
10. “As to Taxes, they are evidently inseparable from Government. It is impossible without them to pay the debts of the nation, to protect it from foreign danger, or to secure individuals from lawless violence and rapine.” –-Alexander Hamilton: Address to the Electors of the State of New York, March, 1801
found here:
http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-25-02-0197
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Constitutional Myth #4: The Constitution Doesn't Separate Church and State
GARRETT EPPSJUN 15 2011, 1:15 PM ET
America's Founding Fathers may not have included the phrase, but the history is clear--they never wanted a Christian nation
Christine O'Donnell died for the far right's constitutional sins.
In the fall of 2010, the dilettante-witch-turned-Tea-Party-Senate-candidate sneered at her opponent, Democrat Chris Coons, when he pointed out in a debate that the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits "an establishment of religion."
O'Donnell: Let me just clarify: You're telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?
Coons: Government shall make no establishment of religion.
O'Donnell: That's in the First Amendment?
O'Donnell paid with a thumping repudiation at the polls even in a year of far-right victories. But her mistake was not a random one. As Rush Limbaugh explained in defense of O'Donnell, "She was incredulous that somebody was saying that the Constitution said there must be separation between church and state. Those words are not in the Constitution." In 2006, Michelle Bachmann warned a Christian group that public schools "are teaching children that there is separation of church and state, and I am here to tell you that is a myth." This year's right-wing pinup, amateur historian David Barton, devotes his book Original Intent: The Courts, The Constitution, and Religion to the proposition that separation of church and state is "a relatively recent concept rather than ... a long-standing constitutional principle."
The attack on separation of church and state involves twisting words and reading history backwards, and it involves making an inconvenient part of the Constitution disappear. Most ardently espoused by loud foes of "big government," the attack aims to place government in charge of Americans' spiritual lives.
The idea is that the Framers desired a Christian nation, in which government oversaw the spiritual development of the people by reminding them of their religious duties and subsidizing the churches where they worship. "Establishment of religion," in this reading, simply means that no single Christian denomination could be officially favored. But official prayers, exhortations to faith, religious monuments, and participation by church bodies in government were all part of the "original intent," the argument goes.
Because the words "separation of church and state" do not appear in the Constitution, the argument runs, the document provides for merger of the two.
It's bosh: ahistorical, untextual, illogical.
Patriots like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison were profoundly skeptical about the claims of what they called "revealed religion." As children of the 18th-century Enlightenment, they stressed reason and scientific observation as a means of discovering the nature of "Providence," the power that had created the world. Jefferson, for example, took a pair of scissors to the Christian New Testament and cut out every passage that suggested a divine origin and mission for Jesus. In their long correspondence, Jefferson and John Adams swapped frequent witticisms about the presumption of the clergy. ("Every Species of these Christians would persecute Deists," Adams wrote on June 25, 1813, "as soon as either Sect would persecute another, if it had unchecked and unbalanced power. Nay, the Deists would persecute Christians, and Atheists would persecute Deists, with as unrelenting Cruelty, as any Christians would persecute them or one another. Know thyself, Human Nature!") As president, Adams signed (and the U.S. Senate approved) the 1797 Treaty with Tripoli, which reassured that Muslim nation that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
James Madison, the father of both the Constitution and the First Amendment, consistently warned against any attempt to blend endorsement of Christianity into the law of the new nation. "Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions," he wrote in his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments in 1785, "may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?" Unlike the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution conspicuously omits any reference to God.
The words "separation of church and state" are not in the text; the idea of separation is. Article VI provides that all state and federal officials "shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." The First Amendment's Establishment Clause (which Christine O'Donnell had apparently not read) provides that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"--meaning that not only no church but no "religion" could be made the official faith of the United States. Finally the Free Exercise Clause provides that Congress shall not make laws "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. (These prohibitions were extended to state governments by the Fourteenth Amendment, whose framers in 1866 wanted to make sure that the states maintained free, democratic systems instead of the old antebellum slave oligarchies that spawned the Civil War.)
If government can't require its officials to support a church; may not support a church itself; and may not interfere with the worship or belief of any church, is there a serious argument that church and state are not separate?
The attack on separation began as an attack on a letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, dated Jan. 1. 1802. Jefferson assured the Baptists that "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State." In 1985, then-Justice William Rehnquist wrote that "unfortunately the Establishment Clause has been expressly freighted with Jefferson's misleading metaphor for nearly 40 years."
But this argument ignores a historical fact. It's not Jefferson's metaphor. Even in 1802, separation was already deeply rooted in American religious history. In 1644, the American theologian Roger Williams, founder of the first Baptist congregation in the British New World, coined the phrase to signify the protection that the church needed in order to prevent misuse and corruption by political leaders: "The church of the Jews under the Old Testament in the type and the church of the Christians under the New Testament in the antitype were both separate from the world; and when they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made his garden a wilderness."
It is this concept--that use by political leaders of religion for their own ends was a danger both to the faithful and to the peace of society--that the Constitution embodies. James Madison wrote that government involvement with the church "implies either that the civil magistrate is a competent judge of religious truth; or that he may employ religion as an engine of civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation."
The current right-wing drive to harness the power of government to bring souls to Christ is dangerous and un-American. As no less conservative a figure than Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in 2005: "Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?"
Garrett Epps's Full Constitutional Myth Series:
Myth #1: The Right Is 'Originalist,' Everyone Else Is 'Idiotic'
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/constitutional-myth-1-the-right-is-originalist-everyone-else-is-idiotic/239291/
Myth #2: The 'Purpose' of the Constitution Is to Limit Congress
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/06/constitutional-myth-2-the-purpose-of-the-constitution-is-to-limit-congress/239374/
Myth #3: The 'Unitary Executive' is a Dictator in War and Peace
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/06/constitutional-myth-3-the-unitary-executive-is-a-dictator-in-war-and-peace/239627/
Myth #4: The Constitution Doesn't Separate Church and State
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/06/constitutional-myth-4-the-constitution-doesnt-separate-church-and-state/240481/
Myth #5: Corporations Have the Same Free-Speech Rights as Individuals
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/06/constitutional-myth-5-corporations-have-the-same-free-speech-rights-as-individuals/240874/
Myth #6: The Second Amendment Allows Citizens to Threaten Government
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/06/constitutional-myth-6-the-second-amendment-allows-citizens-to-threaten-government/241298/
Myth #7: The 10th Amendment Protects 'States' Rights'
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/07/constitutional-myth-7-the-10th-amendment-protects-states-rights/241671/
here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/06/constitutional-myth-4-the-constitution-doesnt-separate-church-and-state/240481/
========= Another Interesting article =========
The Founding Fathers Backed Thomas Piketty—And Feared a Powerful 1 Percent
On this patriotic holiday weekend, remember the founding fathers' warnings about inequality.
July 4, 2014
Many of America’s Founders believed that excessive wealth inequality would be incompatible with having a representative republic. They did not expect wealth to be identically distributed, but many did envision a thriving middle class with very broad-based capital ownership and they supported muscular government policies to allow citizens to acquire property on an ongoing basis. Following their lead, our principal strategy to deal with wealth inequality should be to make every citizen a capitalist by encouraging meaningful broad-based profit sharing and employee ownership and remaking our tax system to make this possible.
In his 1787 book, “A Defense of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States,” John Adams, later the second U.S. president, wrote: “If all power be suffered to slide into hands not interested in the rights of property … one of two things cannot fail to happen.” His first prediction was that the majority “will unite against” those with property. His second prediction was that the dependence of the majority “will render them mercenary instruments of wealth.”
Adams opened this passage by asking his readers to imagine a nation with a population of 10 million where 1 or 2 million owned most of the property and 8 or 9 million had very little wealth. How prescient! Today, for total U.S. wealth and many specific asset classes of wealth, such as all capital gains, America is approaching a situation where the top 10 percent or the top 20 percent hold far more wealth than the 80 percent of land held by the English aristocracy at the time of the American Revolution.
As half of the country spends its time criticizing Thomas Piketty for doing his research and the other half spends its time figuring out what to actually do next, it is time to examine how some major American historical figures considered how to balance the tension between economic development and our democratic ideals of equality. There is much to be learned about what America’s early leaders thought about these problems, how they struggled to resolve them, how their favored solution – shares of property – has evolved in American history and how it could address the inequality dilemma that is top-of-mind today.
Soon-to-be president George Washington said that “America will be the most favorable country of any kind in the world for persons of industry and frugality, possessed on moderate capital… and the lowest class of people because of the equal distribution of property.” At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, James Madison, later the fourth president, echoed the fears of Adams and recognized that the combination of unequal property plus widespread voting suffrage could lead to redistribution laws – not unlike the global wealth tax we have heard so much about since Piketty’s book hit the American press.
more here:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/founding-fathers-backed-thomas-piketty-and-feared-powerful-1-percent
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larger: http://i.imgur.com/ybSyfTE.jpg
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