Today, while driving from a hospital to my office, I listened to the Diane Rehm Show, hosted this week by Susan Page. Page interviewed the Pullitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff, who has written about Benjamin Franklin's time in Paris during the American Revolution.
Page asked Schiff what set Franklin apart from the other Founding Fathers. First, Schiff said, he was much older than the rest. That's true.
Next, she said that Franklin was an utterly committed democrat, who believed in complete equality for all. Maybe, but whether Franklin was the only one of the founders who felt this way is a point not worth quibbling over, I guess.
Third, she said, that Franklin was the only Founding Father who was not college educated.
Whether this last point is true of all the others who led the Revolution, I can't say for sure. But I can say emphatically that George Washington had no college education and in fact, had less formal education even than Abraham Lincoln, whose sparse schooling, coupled with his massive intellectual attainments often cause us to marvel. Among the Founders, Washington, no less than Franklin, was a man who constantly bettered himself.
There are two reasons I think that this is important:
(1) Washington regularly and chronically doesn't get his due. Garry Wills has said that Washington was the greatest political leader of all time. I agree. Twice in his life, Washington did something unprecedented before his time: He walked away from the possibility of exercising absolute, unquestioned executive power. While people like Jefferson talked about democracy, Washington lived it. The measure of the impact of Washington's self-denial is that today in America and in many nations mimicking our example, the peaceful transition of power is taken for granted. Before Washington, the transfer of executive power occasioned succession battles that resulted in war, unless a nation had adopted a system of hereditary royal rule. For helping the world break from this centuries-old approach to things, Washington is surely worthy of study.
(2) When a Pullitzer Prize-winning historian doesn't get this fundamental fact about the Founding Father right--actually, ignoring him--it tells us something about the quality of our society's awareness of our national history.
A recent piece by Clive Davis of TechCentral.com revealed that the people of Great Britain, our nation's closest ally, have an overwhelmingly negative view of America and Americans, no longer regarding our country as worthy of emulation by democracies. He said that Britons were reacting more to American mass culture than to our history or our institutions.
I believe that this is true of most Americans today as well, especially our young people. There is so much cynicism and such a sense of entitlement that prevalent in America today. But I believe that if young people were introduced to the history of this country and what a precious heritage of freedom married to mutual responsibility we have in America, some of that cynicism would evaporate and young people would see how precious a gift we have as citizens of this great country. They would understand that America is more than a swath of geography that has a lot of money. They would understand that America was and in many ways, remains, the only country on earth that has ever been about something.
If we want good citizens, we need to do a better job teaching History. From it, we all will learn what America is about and how important it is for each of us to make our contibution to its well being. Passing on this history is one of the most important things we need to do as a society!
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