We the Fallen People, page 35
Wiebe, Robert, 131-132
will of the people, 67, 161
Wilson, James, 46, 52, 67
Wirt, William, 151-154, 176
Witherspoon, John, 71, 73, 254-255
Wolfe, Tom, 250
Worcester, Samuel, 152-153
Worcester v. Georgia, 152-154, 174
World War I, 213
World War II, 11, 163, 213, 257
Notes
Prologue
1. “Transcript, Hillary Clinton’s DNC Speech, Annotated,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2016, www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-hillary-clinton-convention-speech-transcript-20160728-snap-htmlstory.html.
2. Katherine Krueger, “Team Trump Cries ‘Plagiarism’ into the Void After Clinton’s DNC Speech,” July 29, 2016, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/sean-spicer-jeffrey-lord-clinton-plagiarism-de-tocqueville.
3. Ibid.
4. New York Times, November 4, 1952, 23.
5. See, for example, The Des Moines Register, January 18, 1953, 87.
6. Grand Prairie Daily News, January 25, 1953, 7; Burlington Free Press, January 26, 1953, 1; Montgomery Advertiser, January 29, 1953, 3.
7. Mansfield News-Journal, May 17, 1963; Kokomo Morning Times, February 16, 1965; San Bernardino County Sun, February 6, 1970; Traverse City Record-Eagle, March 18, 1970; Anniston [AL] Star, December 21, 1980; Palm Beach Post, February 12, 1972; Genoa [IL] Kingston Kirkland News, August 14, 1980; Florida Today [Cocoa, FL], March 26, 1997; The Clinton [MS] News, April 26, 2007.
8. “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with Members of the American Legion Boys Nation,” July 25, 1986, Public Papers of Ronald Reagan, www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-and-question-and-answer-session-members-american-legion-boys-nation.
Introduction
1. Pauline Maier refers to the entire Declaration of Independence as “American Scripture” in her study of the document. See American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
2. G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America (1922; repr., London: Catholic Way Publishing, 2012), 6, 4.
3. Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 54.
4. Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government Remains Near Historic Lows as Partisan Attitudes Shift,” May 3, 2017, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/05/03/public-trust-in-government-remains-near-historic-lows-as-partisan-attitudes-shift.
5. Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government Remains Near Historic Lows”; Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government, 1958–2019,” April 11, 2019, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/04/11/public-trust-in-government-1958-2019.
6. Pew Research Center, “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider,” October 5, 2017, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/10/05/the-partisan-divide-on-political-values-grows-even-wider; Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020), 17.
7. Robert J. Samuelson, “Everyone Is Mad at Everyone,” Washington Post, July 3, 2017; Arthur C. Brooks, Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt (New York: Broadside Books, 2019), 4; Pew Research Center, “Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016,” June 22, 2016, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/06/22/partisanship-and-political-animosity-in-2016; Philip Bump, “Three-Quarters of Americans Know Only a Few People Who Support the Candidate They Themselves Oppose,” Washington Post, September 18, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/18/three-quarters-americans-know-only-few-people-who-support-candidate-they-themselves-oppose/.
8. Nathaniel Persily and Jon Cohen, “Americans Are Losing Faith in Democracy—and in Each Other,” Washington Post, October 14, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americans-are-losing-faith-in-democracy—and-in-each-other/2016/10/14/b35234ea-90c6-11e6-9c52-0b10449e33c4_story.html.
9. Lee Drutman, Larry Diamond, Joe Goldman, “Follow the Leader: Exploring American Support for Democracy and Authoritarianism,” www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/follow-the-leader#appendix-a-comparison-of-our-findings-to-2017-survey-by-the-pew-research-center; Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2018), 105-11; Richard Wike et al., “Globally, Broad Support for Representative and Direct Democracy: But Many Also Endorse Nondemocratic Alternatives,” Pew Research Center, October 16, 2017, http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/10/17102729/Pew-Research-Center_Democracy-Report_2017.10.16.pdf; Michael Albertus and Guy Grossman, “Americans Are Officially Giving Up on Democracy,” Foreign Policy, October 16, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/16/americans-are-officially-giving-up-on-democracy.
10. Democracy Project, “The Democracy Project: Reversing a Crisis of Confidence,” www.democracyprojectreport.org/report; Pew Research Center, “2020 Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, Wave 69, June 2020,” www.pewresearch.org/politics/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/06/topline-FOR-RELEASE.pdf.
11. Anthony Salvanto et al., “CBS News Poll: Most Feel Election Is ‘Settled’ but Trump Voters Disagree,” CBS News, December 13, 2020, www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-poll-most-feel-election-is-settled-but-trump-voters-disagree; Fox News poll, December 11, 2020, https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2020/12/Fox_December-6-9-2020_National_Topline_December-11-Release.pdf.
12. Elizabeth McLaughlin and Luis Martinez, “Pentagon Defends Defense Secretary’s Call to ‘Dominate the Battle Space,’” ABC News, June 2, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pentagon-defends-defense-secretarys-call-dominate-battle-space/story?id=71020529; Julian Borger, “‘Slide to Illiberalism’: Ex-General Joins Chorus of Condemnation of Trump,” The Guardian, June 4, 2020, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/04/trump-military-retired-general-john-allen-protest; Justin Vallejo, “Michael Flynn Calls for Trump to Suspend the Constitution and Declare Martial Law to Re-run Election,” The Independent, December 3, 2020, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/michael-flynn-suspend-constitution-martial-law-trump-reelection-b1765467.html.
13. Daniel A. Cox, “After the Ballots Are Counted: Conspiracies, Political Violence, and American Exceptionalism,” American Enterprise Institute, February 2021, www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/After-the-Ballots-Are-Counted.pdf?x91208.
14. Ibid.
15. Chesterton quoted in Kent R. Hill, “Chesterton, Democracy, and the Permanent Things,” in Permanent Things: Toward the Recovery of a More Human Scale at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Andrew A. Tadie and Michael H. McDonald (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 94.
16. C. S. Lewis, “Membership,” in C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Leslie Walmsley (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 336-37; C. S. Lewis, “Equality,” in Present Concerns: Essays by C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 17.
17. Irving Kristol, On the Democratic Idea in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 51.
18. 2 Timothy 4:3.
19. See, for example, Des Moines Register, January 18, 1953, 88.
20. Reprinted in [Minneapolis] Star-Tribune, January 14, 1971, 13.
21. John J. Pitney Jr., “The Tocqueville Fraud,” The Weekly Standard, November 13, 1995; John J. Pitney Jr., “As the Great Tocqueville Never Said,” Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1996.
22. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Olivier Zunz (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2004), 295. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent citations of Democracy in America refer to this edition.
23. Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), chapter one.
24. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 483, 542, 555, 557.
25. John L. O’Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” The United States Democratic Review 6, no. 23 (1839): 426-27.
26. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966), 207-8.
27. Psalm 144:4; James 4:14.
28. Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 25.
29. Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), 5:537.
30. Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality (New York: Viking, 2019), 107; “A Landholder” [Oliver Ellsworth], “To the Landholders and Farmers,” Connecticut Courant, December 17, 1787, in The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification, ed. Bernard Bailyn (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1993), part 1, 521.
31. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Penguin, 1961), 378, 379, 384.
32. Bailyn, Debate on the Constitution, part 1, 201.
33. John Spencer Bassett, ed., Correspondence of Andrew Jackson (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1928), 3:412; James D. Richardson, comp., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), 4:1515.
34. George Bancroft, “The People in Art, Government, and Religion” (1835), in Modern Eloquence: Occasional Addresses, ed. Thomas B. Reed (Philadelphia: John B. Morris and Co., 1900), 7:79.
35. Joseph L. Blau, ed., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy: Representative Writings of the Period 1825–1850 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1947), 21, 22, 33; Herman Melville, White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (London: Richard Bentley, 1850), 239.
36. Tocqueville to Louis de Kergorlay, June 29, 1831, in Alexis de Tocqueville, Letters from America, ed. Frederick Brown (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 87.
37. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 282, 834.
38. Ibid., 480.
39. Ibid., 360.
Part One: Governing a Fallen People
1. Michael Meyerson, Liberty’s Blueprint: How Madison and Hamilton Wrote the Federalist Papers, Defined the Constitution, and Made Democracy Safe for the World (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 12; John P. Kaminski, ed., The Founders on the Founders: Word Portraits from the American Revolutionary Era (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 374, 377.
2. John Ferling, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 267; Kaminski, Founders on the Founders, 377; Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 115; Meyerson, Liberty’s Blueprint, 11.
3. Kaminski, Founders on the Founders, 377; James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 24 October 1787, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov.
4. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #15, in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. J. R. Pole (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 81; George Washington to John Jay, 18 May 1786, Founders Online.
5. Ibid., 219; James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 17 October 1788, Founders Online.
6. James Madison, Federalist #51, 281.
Chapter :1 Asking Different Questions
1. James Madison to Jared Sparks, April 8, 1831, in The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand, 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 3:499; Daniel L. Dreisbach, Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 137.
2. William Few, Autobiography of William Few (n.d.), in Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention, 3:423.
3. David O. Stewart, The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 33.
4. Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Random House, 2009), 36.
5. James Madison, Notes on Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), 209-11.
6. Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention, 1:452.
7. For an outstanding introduction to the history of this question, see John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (Lexington, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011).
8. David Bebbington, Patterns in History: A Christian View (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 3.
9. 1 Corinthians 2:11.
10. A meticulous review of the hundreds of pages of Madison’s notes on the Constitutional Convention uncovered only one explicit appeal to the Bible in support of a specific constitutional provision, an allusion by Benjamin Franklin to Exodus 18:21. See Daniel Dreisbach, “The Bible and the Political Culture of the American Founding,” in Faith and the Founders of the American Republic, ed. Daniel Dreisbach and Mark David Hall (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 60. A comprehensive study of 190 major pro-Constitution writings published in 1787–1788 fails to uncover a single explicit allusion to Scripture. See Donald S. Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 78 (1984): 194.
11. Bebbington, Patterns in History, 3.
12. Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, in Philosophy, Politics, and Morals, 6 vols. (Philadelphia: William Duane, 1808–1818). For Franklin’s prepared remarks, as well as his subsequent notation that the convention “thought prayers unnecessary,” see 1:474-75.
13. Nathaniel A. Haven to John Adams, 27 August 1821, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov. Haven was quoting from “New Churches,” London Quarterly Review 46 (October 1820): 551.
14. The account first appeared in the letter of William Steele to Jonathan D. Steele, September 1825, and is reprinted in whole in Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention, 3:467-73. For examples of contemporary circulation of the letter in whole or in part, see National Intelligencer, August 26, 1826, and Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald 33 (April 1832), 129-30.
15. Beeman, Plain, Honest Men, 203.
16. Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory (Tarrytown, NY: Fleming H. Revell, 1977), 343.
17. See Tim LaHaye, Faith of Our Founding Fathers (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1990), 57, 123-24; David Barton, Original Intent: The Courts, the Constitution, and Religion (Aledo, TX: Wallbuilders Press, 1996), 116-18; Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty (New York: Viking, 2016), 206; Michael Medved, The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic (New York: Crown Forum, 2016), 104-7.
18. Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Brooke Allen, “Our Godless Constitution,” The Nation, February 21, 2005, 14-20.
19. On thinking Christianly, see Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind (London: Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 1963), especially chapter two.
20. Metaxas, If You Can Keep It, 10, 25.
21. Henry Knox to George Washington, 23 October 1786, Founders Online; John Jay to George Washington, 27 June 1786, Founders Online; George Washington to Henry Knox, 26 December 1786, Founders Online.
22. Mercy Otis Warren to John Adams, December 1786, Founders Online; John Adams to James Warren, 9 January 1787, Founders Online.
23. Diary of George Washington, 30 January 1786, Founders Online; Neil Jamieson to Thomas Jefferson, 12 July 1784, Founders Online.
24. Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 68; Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne Cohler et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 36; John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, 16 April 1776, Founders Online.
25. Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 34.
26. Daniel J. Boorstin, ed., An American Primer (New York: Penguin, 1966), 221-22; Benjamin Franklin to the Abbés Chalut and Arnoux, 17 April 1787, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. William Temple Franklin, 3rd edition (London: Henry Colburn, 1818), vol. III, pt. 1, 220; John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, 16 April 1776, Founders Online; Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1993), part 2, 513.
27. Shain, Myth of American Individualism, 43; John Dickinson, “Letters of a Farmer in Pennsylvania” (1768), in The Writings of John Dickinson: Political Writings, 1764–1774, ed. Paul L. Ford (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1895), 397; Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 129, 132; Diary of John Adams, 21 July 1786, Founders Online.
