By Robert Curry
Thursday, June 13, 2019
We have forgotten so much of what Americans once knew
about America. To choose just one example—a simple but telling one—there is the
name of the city of Cincinnati.
For decades, I have been conducting a kind of
unscientific poll. Whenever I meet someone from Cincinnati, I always say,
“Cincinnati. What an interesting name that is. Do you know where it came from?”
The question generally elicits a blank look.
So far, no one I have asked has been able to provide the answer. (I am
certain many people from Cincinnati do know the answer, but evidently many
don’t.)
Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to pick on the
fine citizens of this great city; many of us who are not from Cincinnati can’t
answer the question either.
This would have astonished Americans of the Founders’
generation and many later generations of Americans. Once upon a time, every
American knew quite a bit about the men known as the Cincinnati—and about the
man they were named for. That man was George Washington.
Washington was celebrated as “Cincinnatus.” He earned
that name by being an astonishing example of republican virtue.
Meet the Original
Cincinnatus
Washington led America to victory in the American
Revolution, but he did not then seize political power, as many in Europe
assumed he would and as his contemporary Napoleon did after the French
Revolution. In London, George III asked the American-born painter Benjamin West
what Washington, having won the war, would do.
West replied that it was said he would return to his farm. “If he does
that,” said the king, “he will be the greatest man in the world.”
Washington did that, and he was. And then he outdid even
that by giving up power yet again.
Peace concluded, Washington resigned his military
commission and went home to Mount Vernon and private life in 1783, astonishing
the world. He returned to public life to preside over the Constitutional
Convention in 1787, and to public office when he was elected president in 1789.
He served two terms as president, each time winning every vote of the Electoral
College.
His campaign for the second term consisted of him not
declining to serve. Americans from all walks of life sent him letters begging
him to continue in office and ministers led their congregations in prayer that
he would consent to serve again. He then again astonished the world by
declining to serve a third term, leaving office in 1797 and retiring to Mount
Vernon, a private citizen once more.
It was for these actions specifically that Washington was
known as Cincinnatus. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a hero of the Roman
Republic. In the fifth century B.C., the Roman Senate called on Cincinnatus to
lead the army of the republic against foreign invaders. After leading the army
to victory, he resigned his commission and retired to his farm.
So, who were the Cincinnati? The Cincinnati were the
officers who served with Washington in the Revolutionary War. They were bright
with fame because they reflected the glory of their leader. In 1783, they
founded the Society of the Cincinnati, and the city was named in their honor in
1790.
Not that long ago, just about any American knew as much
or, even more, probably could even have named a few of the most famous
Cincinnati. Today, not so much. But our forgetting is not limited to
interesting historical facts. What has been forgotten includes the purpose of
essential elements of the Founders’ design.
The Founders’
Magnificent Creation
Take, for one example, the Senate. Many of us do not know
that senators were originally chosen by the state legislatures—and this change
was made not that long ago. In 1913, around the beginning of the Progressive
Era, the 17th Amendment to the Constitution tossed aside this critical feature
of the Framers’ design, replacing it with the direct election of senators we
have today.
The Founders would certainly have opposed the 17th
Amendment because they would have understood that it would throw the system
they gave us completely out of balance, as it, in fact, has done. It was
perhaps the single change that would do the most to undo what the Founders had
accomplished by means of the Constitution.
Americans in 1913 showed by their votes they had
forgotten the purpose of the Framers’ design for the Senate. We today, by and
large, have even forgotten that generation’s forgetting.
The consequences of this change to America’s
constitutional order have been many and profound. Probably the most obvious has
been the inevitable erosion of the independence of the states and of their
ability to counterbalance federal power.
The Senate was once a barrier to the passage of federal
laws infringing on the powers reserved to state governments, but the Senate has
abandoned that responsibility under the incentives of the new system of
election. Because the state governments no longer have a powerful standing body
representing their interests within the federal government, the power of the
federal government has rapidly grown at the expense of the states. State
governments increasingly are relegated to functioning as administrative units
of today’s gargantuan central government.
The Founders would say we no longer have a federal
system, that the 17th Amendment in effect overthrew the 10th Amendment. Here is the 10th: “The powers not delegated
to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States,
are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The 10th has become a dead letter. Instead of retaining
many of their powers and responsibilities as the Framers intended, the states
are more and more entangled in administering federal programs and in carrying
out federal mandates. These mandates are often not even funded by the federal
government; the costs of unfunded mandates fall on the states.
The many new departments of the federal government that
have accumulated in Washington, D.C. during the Progressive Era in which you
and I now live, such as Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human
Services, and the Department of Education, involve themselves in, and even
direct, functions the Framers left to the states.
Politics Ought to
Be Local and Limited in Scope
According to the Founders’ vision, American political
life was to be vibrantly local and limited in scope. Our contemporary obsession
with national politics, the natural result of the centralization of enormous
political power in Washington, was not what they intended.
Madison and the other Founders put much emphasis on the
importance of the independence of the states to the preservation of Americans’
liberty. Lord Acton, the great scholar of the history of liberty, agreed with
them: “Federalism: It is coordination instead of subordination; association
instead of hierarchical order; independent forces curbing each other; balance,
therefore, liberty.”
Direct election of U.S. senators undermined this
critically important protection of liberty. The erosion of Americans’
individual liberty that has resulted is no doubt the most important consequence
of the change. Many of our troubles today are self-inflicted, the result of us
forgetting how the Founders’ system was designed to work and the unwise changes
we have made because of our forgetting.
Tragically, because of our forgetting, we may be on the
verge of making another mistake like the one Americans made in 1913. There is a
powerful movement afoot to get rid of the Electoral College, an essential
constitutional safeguard of American liberty.
As you know, each state is allotted as many electoral
votes as it has senators and members of the House of Representatives. To become
president of the United States, one must win election state by state.
Eliminating the Electoral College and electing the president by direct vote, as
the progressives are determined to do, would transform the office. Its occupant
would in effect become the president of the Big Cities of America, and the last
vestiges of autonomy guaranteed to the individual states by the Constitution’s
electoral system would be swept away.
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