Few topics in American history seem hotter these days than the study of the Founding Fathers. Should we revere them for their efforts to erect the framework of our more than two-century-old constitutional republic? Should we revile the ?dead white males? for their unwillingness to erase America?s ?original sin? of slavery?
R.B. Bernstein of the New York University Law School explores those questions in a brief volume, The Founding Fathers Reconsidered. While Bernstein appears to approach his subject matter from a left-of-center perspective (he has little use for ?originalism,? for example), he is fair in discussing multiple viewpoints about the Founders.
One of Bernstein?s more interesting emphases is the extent to which latter-day politicians of various stripes tried to tie their policies to those of the founding generation:
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who embraced a pragmatic, experimental approach to the problems of government, regularly sought to align himself and his administration with the founding fathers. Roosevelt recognized that winning the battle for the warrant of history was an essential precondition to victory in the political battles of his own time. For these reasons, he insisted that he was merely being true to the founding fathers? commitment to pragmatic experimentation.
Roosevelt?s greatest defeat as president came when he lost a key battle over which side was truer to the Constitution and the founding fathers. In 1937, after his landslide reelection, he decided to move against the one institution that continued to threaten the success of the New Deal ? the Supreme Court. Roosevelt proposed to reorganize the Court. ? The plan sparked a firestorm of criticism and controversy. Was Roosevelt seeking to undermine the principles of separation of powers and checks and balances that the founding fathers installed at the core of the Constitution? Or were the justices? assertions of such principles as reasons to strike down New Deal legislation distortions and caricatures of the founding fathers? original intent? ? Ultimately, public opinion and the growing skepticism even of many of Roosevelt?s allies in Congress doomed the Court-packing plan. To many Americans, it appeared that Roosevelt had challenged the founding fathers, and lost.
