From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   One   
      
   The Confidence of the Whole People   
      
   Visions of the Presidency, the Ideas of Progress and Prosperity, and “We,   
   the People”   
      
   Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good   
   government. —Alexander Hamilton, The New-York Packet, Tuesday, March 18, 1788   
      
   I think that ’twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all   
   talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. —Words   
   popularly attributed to Sojourner Truth, the Woman’s Rights Convention in   
   Akron, Ohio, 1851   
      
   Dreams of God and of gold (not necessarily in that order) made America   
   possible. The First Charter of Virginia—the 1606 document that authorized   
   the founding of Jamestown—is 3,805 words long. Ninety-eight of them are   
   about carrying religion to “   
   such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true   
   Knowledge and Worship of God”; the other 3,707 words in the charter concern   
   the taking of “all the Lands, Woods, Soil, Grounds, Havens, Ports, Rivers,   
   Mines, Minerals, Marshes,    
   Waters, Fishings, Commodities,” as well as orders to “dig, mine, and   
   search for all Manner of Mines of Gold, Silver, and Copper.”   
      
   Explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought riches; religious   
   dissenters came seeking freedom of worship. In 1630, the Puritan John   
   Winthrop, who crossed a stormy Atlantic aboard the Arbella, wrote a sermon,   
   “A Model of Christian    
   Charity,” that explicitly linked the New World to a religious vision of a   
   New Jerusalem. “For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a   
   hill,” Winthrop said, drawing on Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. (Forever   
   shrewd about visuals, Ronald    
   Reagan added the adjective shining to the image several centuries later.)   
      
   We’ve always lived with—and perpetuated—fundamental contradiction. In   
   1619, a Dutch “man of warre” brought about twenty captive Af   
   icans—“negars”—to Virginia, the first chapter in the saga of American   
   slavery. European settlers,    
   meanwhile, set about removing Native American populations, setting in motion a   
   tragic chain of events that culminated in the Trail of Tears. And so while   
   whites built and dreamed, people of color were subjugated and exploited by a   
   rising nation that    
   prided itself on the expansion of liberty. Those twin tragedies shaped us then   
   and ever after.   
      
   As did basic facts of geography. There was a breathtaking amount of room to   
   run in the New World. The vastness of the continent, the wondrous frontier,   
   the staggering natural resources: These, combined with a formidable American   
   work ethic, made the    
   pursuit of wealth and happiness more than a full-time proposition. It was a   
   consuming, all-enveloping one.   
      
   For many, birth mattered less than it ever had before. Entitled aristocracies   
   crumbled before natural ones. If you were a white man and willing to work, you   
   stood a chance of transcending the circumstances of your father and his   
   father’s father and of    
   joining the great company of “enterprising and self-made men,” as Henry   
   Clay put it in 1832.   
      
   The next year, President Andrew Jackson appointed one such man to be   
   postmaster of Salem, Illinois. Though a Whig at the time—Jackson was a   
   Democrat—Abraham Lincoln was happy to accept. His rise from frontier origins   
   became both fable and staple in    
   the American narrative. Lincoln understood the power of his story, for he knew   
   that he embodied broad American hopes. “I happen, temporarily, to occupy   
   this big White House,” Lincoln told the 166th Ohio Regiment in the summer of   
   1864. “I am a    
   living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my   
   father’s child has.”   
      
   No understanding of American life and politics is possible without a sense of   
   the mysterious dynamic between the presidency and the people at large. Sundry   
   economic, geographic, and demographic forces, of course, shape the nation.   
   Among these is an    
   unspoken commerce involving the most ancient of institutions, a powerful   
   chief, and the more modern of realities, a free, disputatious populace. In   
   moments when public life feels unsatisfactory, then, it’s instructive—even   
   necessary—to remember    
   first principles. What can the presidency be, at its best? And how should the   
   people understand their own political role and responsibilities in what   
   Jefferson called “the course of human events”?   
      
   In the beginning, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787,   
   the presidency was a work in progress. Ambivalent about executive authority,   
   many of the framers were nevertheless anxious to rescue the tottering American   
   nation. Governed by    
   the weak Articles of Confederation—national power was diffuse to   
   nonexistent—the country, George Washington wrote in November 1786, was   
   “fast verging to anarchy & confusion!” The Constitutional Convention,   
   which ran from May to September of 1787,    
   was focused on bringing stability to the unruly world of competing state   
   governments and an ineffectual national Congress.   
      
   In 1776’s Common Sense, Thomas Paine had suggested the title of   
   “President” for the leader of a future American government. Still, the   
   colonial suspicion of monarchial power was evident in Paine’s pamphlet.   
   “But where, say some, is the king of    
   America?” Paine wrote. “I’ll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth   
   not make havoc of mankind like the royal brute of Great Britain. . . .   
   For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law   
   ought to be king, and    
   there ought to be no other.”   
      
   The tension between the widespread Paine view (that central authority was   
   dangerous) and the practical experience of the Revolutionary War and the   
   Confederation period (that a weak national government was even more dangerous)   
   shaped the thoughts and    
   actions of the delegates who gathered in the Pennsylvania State House, now   
   known as Independence Hall, in May 1787. Physically diminutive but   
   intellectually powerful, James Madison, who laid out a plan for the new   
   government with care, admitted the    
   proper executive structure was a perplexing problem. “A national Executive   
   will also be necessary,” Madison wrote fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph   
   before the convention. “I have scarcely ventured to form my own opinion yet,   
   either of the manner in    
   which it ought to be constituted, or the authorities with which it ought to be   
   clothed.”   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)