The Washington Monument

Clay County Histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC

Next year will be the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence. If our Founding Fathers could see their country today, what would they say? I bet one thing they’d say is “What? You let women vote?!?”
George Washington has not been keeping up with our national political conversation since he died in 1799. The last surviving founders, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826. A lot has happened since then. The signers of the Declaration of Independence never heard of a dinosaur, or a basketball, or a planet called Neptune. Don’t ask them to fix your car, and don’t expect them to have 21st century views on race or women’s rights.
Should we hate them for this? I don’t know. I hate racism and I hate sexism. But I also don’t want to think of everybody who lived before me as stupid and evil. I’m inclined to cut them some slack. As Isaac Newton pointed out, we can only see as far as we do because we are standing on the shoulders of giants. It seems snobbish to look down on the people who boosted us up to this height.
As children in the 1700s, they were taught certain ideas: kings are appointed by God so we have to do what they say; people whose skin is within a certain color range can be enslaved for life; aristocrats should make all the political decisions because they are born superior to regular people; lightning is a sign of God’s anger; women must be obedient to men…I am astonished that Americans of the Revolutionary generation overturned so many wrong ideas, and not very surprised that they perpetuated others.
We always ask ourselves: “What would the founders think?” Well, there were a whole lot of founders, with a wide range of opinions, and they argued all the time. Several founders liked slavery just fine. Benjamin Franklin enslaved people for much of his life, but he eventually concluded that slavery was wrong and became president of America’s first Abolitionist society. George Washington also came to believe that slavery was wrong, but his pampered lifestyle as a southern planter would not have been possible in the 1700s if he had to pay wages to free laborers. George Washington freed all 123 people he was enslaving, but only after he and his wife died.
How could Washington believe something was wrong and do it anyway? Let’s not pretend to be naïve. People do this all the time, especially when that something is central to our lives or the basis of our economy. If you are alarmed that humans are creating climate change, how can you possibly drive a car to work? If you would be horrified in a slaughterhouse, how can you justify eating meat?
We can certainly criticize our Founding Fathers for their actions and ideas and hypocrisy, but we often blame them for falling short of ideals without crediting them for how far forward they took us. These argumentative, flawed people created a government based on lofty goals of liberty, justice, and equality. They could not live up to these ideals. Can anyone? Regardless, they tried, and they made each subsequent generation of Americans promise to do better. Each generation has fallen short, but we have made progress. Now that it’s our turn, it’s our duty to make this country more free, more equal, more just. Ironically, if we do a really good job, future Americans will look back at us and say “How could they have been so barbaric and stupid back in 2025?” And we will make our founders proud.