This is a rant posing as an essay. If you don’t want to read the brutal truth as laid out by a fed-up teenager, this is not the post for you. Have some cat photos. For those who do read this, be aware that the statistics listed were accurate as of July 21st, 2020 but may or may not be so now.
Salutations. Today I am here to debate the quote, “Without the ideas and leadership of Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton, the United States would not be the great nation it is today.”
It is a simple fact in this type of debate that I must agree or disagree with the statement as a whole. If the claim were simply that the previously named gentlemen had made the United States the nation it is today, I would concur. However, the word “great” was inserted, and as such, I must most vehemently disagree.
As much as we try to treat our country as if it’s golden, perfect, flawless, it’s not. If it were, we wouldn’t have a total student loan debt of $1.6 trillion, with an average of over $32,000. We wouldn’t be continually denying and ignoring climate change, our immigration policy wouldn’t be so insensitive that there are children in cages, and there would not be US citizens dying because they can’t afford medical treatment, or working multiple jobs just to survive.
Unfortunately, the truth is that we live in a country that values profits over people, and “freedom” over lives. That’s why there were 418 mass shootings (at least four victims injured/killed in one location, excluding the perpetrator) in 2019 alone but we still haven’t further regulated firearms. A startling amount of the population would rather risk getting sick — and getting everyone else sick — than wear a mask during a pandemic, which is how the United States has 4% of the world’s population, and 26% of global Covid-19 cases! According to the CDC, we now have over 60,000 new cases a day, yet the federal government is pushing to reopen businesses and schools. But that’s alright; we’ve flattened the curve! Vertically.
I imagine my opponents in this debate would argue that those problems have nothing to do with the Founding Fathers. Which is true. The grievances I’ve listed are not their crosses to bear. But as I said before, the entirety of the statement has to be true. As such, these are points to discredit the USA’s purported greatness.
Setting that aside for a moment, there are many points the opposition could make in favor of Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton. After all, Adams nominated Washington to serve as commander in the Revolutionary War and Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence. He helped to negotiate the Treaty of Paris to end the war, and acted as the first American ambassador to Britain. As president, he took a strong stance and set an honest example by refusing to be bullied into unsavory terms during the XYZ Affair with France.
Jefferson, as Adams had nominated him, was the primary draftsman of the historic Declaration of Independence. He wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which established freedom of religion and the separation of church and state, and he founded the University of Virginia — the nation’s first secular university. During his presidency, he doubled the size of the US with the Louisiana Purchase and devised the Lewis and Clark expedition for further exploration. His extensive personal library went on to serve as the foundation for the Library of Congress.
Meanwhile, Hamilton contributed heavily to the American victory at Yorktown, and went on to play a key role in the ratification of the US Constitution. Defending the monumental document, he, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers: a series of 85 essays published in six months, of which Hamilton wrote 51. His persistence was also put to use as Secretary of the Treasury, where he established our national banking system.
All of these points are true. I’m not arguing the fact that these men were instrumental in the creation of the United States as we know it, nor that they have their accomplishments. However, the Founding Fathers also made their share of mistakes that we’re still suffering the consequences of.
In particular, I’m referring to the continued systemic racism, sexism, and party politics that can be traced all the way back to the precedents they set. The Declaration of Independence is well known for the statement, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” And yet the man who wrote these words, Thomas Jefferson, was a slave owner. Admittedly, he was also, at the time, an abolitionist, but even then he believed that black people were innately inferior both mentally and physically to those of European descent. By the early 1790s he had “rationalized an abomination to the point where an absolute moral reversal was reached,” and was bluntly treating slavery as an investment strategy.
His estate of Monticello was, at any one time, residence of about 100 slaves, and he owned over six hundred in his lifetime. Furthermore, at least one of them, and probably five more, were actually children he had fathered with his spouse’s half-sister (who was the product of her father’s affair with one of his slaves). Not only is this infuriating on the basis of racism, but the implicit disrespect he (and Hamilton, who too had an affair) displays for his wife. In fact, Abigail Adams, John Adams’s wife, is reported as “perhaps the only woman he [Jefferson] ever treated as an intellectual equal.”
And then of course, there is the fault of major resonance I find in all three individuals: partisanism. George Washington is credited with saying, “However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” Despite this clear warning against just that, the Hamilton-Jefferson rivalry shaped America’s first political parties: the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. The ramifications of this early-on polarization can easily be felt in our modern two-party system, as can the childish way that Jefferson and Adams handled falling on different sides. Instead of properly discussing and debating their differing opinions, they effectively broke off their friendship, and for twelve years after Jefferson’s inauguration they exchanged no words at all.
To review, I disagree with the statement, “Without the ideas and leadership of Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton, the United States would not be the great nation it is today,” on the grounds that the US is clearly flawed, and while those men made note-worthy accomplishments, they also made resounding errors that continue to damage us as a country. Rather, I believe that, in some part thanks to the ideas and leadership of Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton, the United States has the potential to be a great nation. But we have a long way to go.
