Chatting with Ben about his 鈥� and our 鈥� challenges
Americans are grappling with an onslaught of issues that call into question just what holds us together as a nation. The nation鈥檚 founders have some advice.
Americans are grappling with an onslaught of issues that call into question just what holds us together as a nation. The nation鈥檚 founders have some advice.
It鈥檚 not every day that a reporter gets an email from Ben Franklin.
In the course of reporting a story on historical reenactors from the American Revolutionary War period, I was in regular email contact with two Ben Franklins, one George Washington, and an 18th-century tavern owner from the British colony of New Hampshire. One of the Bens invited me to read his Substack column. It reads exactly like Ben Franklin would have written it if he did, in fact, live in a society that had capitalized on the newly discovered energy source of electricity, taken a magical carriage ride through the Industrial Age to the computer age, and ditched typeset printing tools for digital publishing.
Why would a Monitor reporter do any of this? The answer is right there in the headlines we read 鈥� or avoid reading 鈥� every day. Americans are grappling with an onslaught of issues that call into question just what holds us together as a nation, and they are doing this at the very moment the country is preparing to celebrate the 250th year of its independence. Taking a look at the issues that America鈥檚 founders, who met in Philadelphia to argue, negotiate, compromise, and finally write the Declaration of Independence, offers a chance to see how far America has come as a democracy, and how far it has yet to go.
Many of the issues that beset us today also seemed unsolvable in 1776. So, the Founding Fathers did what anyone would do: They did the best they could, cobbled together the best solution they could, and moved on to the next issue. As Americans debate modern problems of immigration, taxation, foreign policy, or personal choice, it is reasonable to question what the founders would have done. More than one of the historians I talked with quoted Thomas Jefferson:
鈥淚 am certainly not an advocate for frequent & untried changes in laws and constitutions ... but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind ... we might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.鈥�
We hope you find this brief step back into the 18th century useful in understanding the origins of the 21st-century world we live in today.