The Daily Worker Newspaper, July 3, 1926, Page 12

_ THE FATHERS. - HE Fourth of July has come again. Once more, a docu- ment called the Declaration of In- dependence is recited in the school-rooms and from flag-drap- ed platforms by little children and grown men, equally innocent of all but. the simplest and most doctored details of its birth— and blissfully unaware that it hag long since died except in In- dependence Day rhetoric. ; On this day too are recounted the heroic stories of the fathers of our eountry. Great, epical stories they. are.. Not a word, not a gesture came from these exalted and pious founders of a great re- public that was not godliness itself. All noble men who lived, fought and died for liberty. They sacrificed their lives upon the al- Page tar of battle and travail that [a@igyeeegeices freedom and democracy might be born to flourish for the future generations of a whole continent. Thus, the, sehool-books, thus from the rostrum of congress and. thus from the thousands of other rostrums annually erected for Fourth of July orators. Just who were these fathers? Just what in- terest did they have in independence and liberty? More important yet: what part in this struggle for liberty did the mass of the American people of the time play and what was the attitude of the fathers towards them? ss Let us take five of the oustanding founding fathers. Let us examine who they were and what they did, not in the ingenuous terms of an idoliz- ing and over-zealous historian but in the manner of an impartial editor of a Revolutionary War “Who's Who.” We will take Washington, Ad- ams, Jefferson, Franklin and Hamilton. These men are representative. yeorge Washington’s father was a wealthy Vir- ginia plantation ewner. At the age of sixteen he became a surveyor for a powerful land company: Later on hé was’sent by large West Virginia and Pennsylvania land speculators to plot the Alle- gheny and Ohio valleys. The French came down from the north and built a fort on the present site of Pittsburgh. Washington was chosen as a messenger to warn the French to leave. His ef- forts failed. War was declared and he was given command of regulars under General Braddock in the attack upon Fort Duquesne. After the war, he retired, much enriched to his estate, at Mount Vernon. For fifteen years he led the life of a rich country gentleman planter. He was one of the largest slave-holders in the southern colonies. His marriage brought him an additional $100,000 and made him one of the wealthiest men in the colonies. When the British parliament, by the Quebee act extended the jurisdiction of Canada over the western country, Washington was saved some 30,000 ‘acres of his speculative holdings only by the outbreak of the revolutionary war. A rich.man, a good soldier, he became commander- in-chief of the Continental army. The war was won as much by the laxness of General Howe and the absence of a consistent and well-supported campaign~on the part of the British as it was by the courage and hardiness ofthe volunteers who, fighting for freedom, were left, after the conflict, in a more degraded position than before. ~ Land that was promised to them in the event of victory became the object of speculations which the most revered of the fathers thought nothing of exploit- ing. But Washington became a hero. As a hero, he fitted into the new regime to become the first president. He died much richer than he was born. He was an aristocrat of the first water. Liberty for him meant liberty from England and meant freedom from the competition of English traders and capitalists. For him, the masses were so many different kinds of slaves put here to do the fighting, the work and to carry the heavy burdens for propertied gentlemen’s com- fort. OHN ADAMS, the second president of the United States and another of the founding fathers was an extremely rich Massachusetts lawyer. He came of a wealthy family, graduated from Harvard and later built a very profitable clientile for himself among New England ship- pers and manufacturers. His first bid for fame was his leadership in the struggle against the “stamp act”—one of the impositions by means Soar ~ *» p. z of which the traders and manufacturers of Eng- land hoped to stifle the“nascent and promising trade of the colonies. John Hancock, another signer of the Declara- tion of Independence was one of the richest of the colonial merchant princes and dealt extens- ively in contraband. John Adams was his coun- sel before the British Admiralty Court in’ Bos- ton in a suit for recovery of $500,000 alleged to have been incurred by Hancock as a smuggler— this at the same hour the first blood was flowing in Lexington. During the negotiations for peace, John Jay, Adams and Benj. Franklin were the commission- ers for the colonies. Franklin was sympathetic to France but Adams and Jay were distrustful of their ally and contrary to their instructions dealt direct with the British commissioners without consulting France. However, when the matter of Atlantic fishing rights was discussed, Adams and Jay (first chief justice of the Supreme Court) fought tooth and nail for their former New Eng- land clients. “ie : Addins; even ‘after the revolution; had distinctly monarchist tendencies. He was one of the die- hards of the reactionary Federalist party that elected him president. During his term of office he was responsible for the passage of the in- famous “Alien and Sedition Laws,” expressly framed to suppress freedom of speech and press. He was a consistent advocate of the rights of the propertied classes to hegemony in the state. He himself had an income of $25,000 a year. He was blunt in his expressions of contempt for the “lower classes.” THOMAS JEFFERSON, the author of the Dec- laration of Independence, was of a different type than most of the influential men of the revo- lution and the constitutional convention. He was an individualist and had, unlike the most, certain broad principles that he clung to. But he too was an aristocrat. He was not imbued with too much love of the workers. Like Washington, he was a Virginia tobacco grower. He was a lawyer. He represented, before and after the revolution, not the more powerful sea-board plantation own- ers but the up-land cotton raisers, the home man- ufacturers and the frontiersmen, to whom his philosophy of individualism appealed. He be- came president after the iniquitous. and high- handed administration of Adams and Hamilton had so discredited the Federalist party, that the Whigs, with Jefferson ‘at their head and support- ed by the back-woods farmers and the small sec- Thomas Jefferson ey ee ee 6 By Thurber Lewis tion of the working class that had a vote won the election by a small margin after the deciding vote was given to gongress. But the power of property had been strongly entrenched and was here to Stay. Jefferson rode into office ‘talking of the revolution accomplished by his election. But McMaster observes: “The men who in 1800 voted for Adams, could in T804 see no reason whatever for voting against Jefferson. Scarcely a federal institution was missed. They saw the debt, the bank, the navy still preserved; they saw a broad construction of the constitution, a strong government exercising the rights of sovereignty, and growing more na- tional day by day and they gave it a hearty. sup- port as a government administered in the prin- ciples for which, ever since the constitution was in force, they had contended.” The principle here referred to was, a stron }ly centralized government in which the decistve power-is wielded by property. Thus “Jefferson- ian Democracy” about which Tammany Hall poli- ticians still like to prate is disclosed as merely another form which the dominance of wealth and estate took on at the expense of the exploited masses, e-.@.% ALEXANDER HAMILTON, who, with James Madison, was the controlling influence of the Federalist party was the stoutest of reactionar- ies. He was the chief protagonist. of empowering property with the greatest possible authority. He was the outstanding exponent of a strongly cen- tralized government because the merchants and manufacturers whose interests he represented ee LT John Adams of their enterprises. He too was at heart a monarchist. But the democratic sentiments that had been sown for the purpose of getting the people of the colonies to revolt against the crown was not so easily ban- ished. Hamilton and his colleagues were put to the job of making the best of it by forcing the states to accept a constitution that would in any event guarantee the decisive power to the class that had engineered the revolution. _ Hamilton’s greatest contribution to the class in whose early battles he was thé most spirited fighter was his violent suppression of what was known as the “Whiskey rebellion.” The frog- tiersmen of Pennsylvania had for decades sow corn and distilled it into whiskey. Hamilton, secretary of the treasury, drafted a spirits A the imposition of which was vigorously resented by the frontiersmen. Hamilton persuaded Wash- ington to give him an army of 15,000 men to march into the locality. This overwhelming show of force set a precedent for the national govern- ment to interfere in the affairs of the states and to enforce the detrees of a centralized, property- controlled state. By this act, control was vested in the class that to this day holds the strings of the state power in its grip. Hamilton, with Robert Morris and other “reyo- lutionary” financiers grew rich out of the revolu- tion and the class hegemony that followed it. He organized the first bank in New York and hesi- tated not at all to use his position as secretary of the treasury to favor his institution. During the war, as the confidential agent of John B. Church, Hamilton made a fortune out of the com- missary department of the revolutionary army. Later, when the division of spoils came, he made several more fortunes in land speculatign, land that had been promised to the veterans. One needs only to read the “Federalist,” an organ of the banking and manufacturing inter- ests in which most of the writing was done by Hamilton, to discover in what utter contempt required a centralized state force for the 7 oa ee ee