Were the actions of Thomas Jefferson as president consistent with his constitutional theory? David N. Mayer’s account raises fundamental but unanswered questions. The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson by David N. Mayer (416 pages, University of Virginia Press, 1995) Thomas Jefferson continues to fascinate scholars. A voluminous literature examines his long public career and extensive comments on [...]
President William McKinley championed the American System: “We lead all nations in agriculture; we lead all nations in mining; we lead all nations in manufacturing. These are the trophies which we bring after twenty-nine years of a protective tariff.” A return to the American System would be a major step toward increasing prosperity and restoring [...]
Long before our own time, the customs of our ancestors moulded admirable men, and in turn these eminent men upheld the ways and institutions of their forebears. Our age, however, inherited the Republic like some beautiful painting of bygone days, its colors already fading through great age; and not only has our time neglected to [...]
Nowhere to be seen now are the old Jeffersonians, once a major American type, rebellious men who dared defend the rights of themselves and their communities from outside impositions. But buried somewhere deep in the American soul is a tiny ember of Jeffersonian democracy that now and then gives off an uncertain, feeble, and futile [...]
I suggest a crisis by collecting in one breath the terms national character and political disorder. Nor do I shrink from the implicit affirmation that the people of the United States confront an identity crisis at the very center of our national existence, at once moral and political and touching precisely upon the reciprocal relationship [...]
Our view of the Founding shapes our own view of ourselves. We look back to the Founders as symbols defining who we are and how we understand our culture. Donald Lutz One of the most important questions an American—or even a larger citizen of the West could ask is: what is the significance [...]
The fiercely contested, yet inconclusive election of 1824 set the stage for one of the great debates of American political history. “Mr. Onslow, the ablest among Speakers of the House of Commons, used to say ‘It was a maxim he had often heard when he was a young man, from old and experienced members, that [...]
The first essay of The Federalist provides a convenient point of departure for exploring Publius’s conception of republicanism and the problems associated with it. Towards the end of this essay, he informs us that among the “interesting particulars” he intends to take up in the subsequent papers is “The conformity of the proposed Constitution to [...]
Benjamin Harrison insisted America’s truly dangerous enemies were not Great Powers abroad but a lapse of integrity and purity at home. He believed republicanism would spread in the world by “sympathy and emulation” and feared the harm Americans might do to themselves and to others should they undertake to extend their institutions by force: “We [...]
Just as no person can last forever, no republic can last forever. The trick, however, to prolonging its life is to promote that which gives it energy and vigor in its youth—virtue—and that which also staves off the inevitable tepidness that accompanies mid-life: audacity. No true republican believes that a republic lasts forever. Far from [...]
Many of America’s founders defended religious liberty, believing it grounded on the duty men and women have to worship their Creator. As late as the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans were able to work together to protect that liberty, but unfortunately, the political left has begun to abandon religious freedom. As the 2020 presidential campaign heats [...]
James Henry Stark was a historian and defender of the Loyalists in an age of high reverence for the American Revolution. Stark’s unhappiness at the public presentation and textbook renderings of the Revolution seethed for years, until finally in 1910 he published “Loyalists of Massachusetts” to settle the debate. In March 1910, the wealthy Boston [...]
From Union to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition by Clyde N. Wilson (356 pages, The Foundation for American Education, 2003) “To check power, to return the American empire to republicanism we do not need to resort to the drastic right of revolution nor to the destructive goal of anarchic individualism. We have in the [...]
If anything identifies a conservative, it is his realistic appraisal of human nature—his appreciation of what is good and admirable, and his recognition of what is base. As some renditions of American history would have it, the conservative pedigree in the United States begins with, or at the very least includes, Alexander Hamilton and his [...]