On the 150th anniversary of July 4th, 1776 Lewis briefly reviews the persons and positions of Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin, and, unimpressed, finds little to celebrate in their nation’s founding.

‘The Fathers’ by Thurber Lewis from The Daily Worker Magazine. Vol. 3 No. 147. July 3, 1926.

THE Fourth of July has come again. Once more, a document called the Declaration of Independence is recited in the school-rooms and from flag-draped 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 has long since died except in Independence Day rhetoric.

On this day too are recounted the heroic stories of the fathers of our country. Great, epical stories they are. Not a word, not a gesture came from these exalted and pious founders of a great republic that was not godliness itself. All noble men who lived, fought and died for liberty. They sacrificed their lives upon the altar of battle and travail that freedom and democracy might be born to flourish for the future generations of a whole continent. Thus the school-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 interest 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?

Let us take five of the outstanding founding fathers. Let us examine who they were and what they did, not in the ingenuous terms of an idolizing and over-zealous historian but in the manner of an impartial editor of a Revolutionary War “Who’s Who.” We will take Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin and Hamilton. These men are representative.

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George Washington’s father was a wealthy Virginia plantation owner. At the age of sixteen he became a surveyor for a powerful land company. Later on he was sent by large West Virginia and Pennsylvania land speculators to plot the Allegheny 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 efforts 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 Quebec 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 of the 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 exploiting. 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 comfort.

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JOHN 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 clientele for himself among New England shippers and manufacturers. His first bid for fame was his leadership in the struggle against the “stamp act” one of the impositions by means of which the traders and manufacturers of England hoped to stifle the nascent and promising trade of the colonies.

John Hancock, another signer of the Declaration of Independence was one of the richest of the colonial merchant princes and dealt extensively in contraband. John Adams was his counsel before the British Admiralty Court in Boston 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 commissioners 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 England clients.

Adams, 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 infamous “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.”

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THOMAS JEFFERSON, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was of a different type than most of the influential men of the revolution 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 owners but the upland cotton raisers, the home manufacturers and the frontiersmen, to whom his philosophy of individualism appealed. He became 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 supported by the back-woods farmers and the small section of the working class that had a vote won the election by a small margin after the deciding vote was given to congress.

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 1804 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 national day by day and they gave it a hearty support as a government administered in the principles for which, ever since the constitution was in force, they had contended.”

The principle here referred to was, a strongly centralized government in which the decisive power is wielded by property. Thus “Jeffersonian Democracy” about which Tammany Hall politicians 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.

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ALEXANDER HAMILTON, who, with James Madison, was the controlling influence of the Federalist party was the stoutest of reactionaries. He was the chief protagonist of empowering property with the greatest possible authority. He was the outstanding exponent of a strongly centralized government because the merchants and manufacturers whose interests he represented required a centralized state force for the growth 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 banished. 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 the most spirited fighter was his violent suppression of what was known as the “Whiskey rebellion.” The frontiersmen of Pennsylvania had for decades sown corn and distilled it into whiskey. Hamilton, as secretary of the treasury, drafted a spirits tax, the imposition of which was vigorously resented by the frontiersmen. Hamilton persuaded Washington 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 government to interfere in the affairs of the states and to enforce the decrees 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 “revolutionary” financiers grew rich out of the revolution and the class hegemony that followed it. He organized the first bank in New York and hesitated 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 commissary department of the revolutionary army. Later, when the division of spoils came, he made several more fortunes in land speculation, land that had been promised to the veterans.

One needs only to read the “Federalist,” an organ of the banking and manufacturing interests in which most of the writing was done by Hamilton, to discover in what utter contempt this particular father held the working masses of the “democracy.”

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BENJAMIN FRANKLIN is to this day regarded as one of the great prophets of business. He was in many ways a remarkable man. His literary and scientific achievements were very creditable. But he was also a business man of great wealth. For example he had no scruples about as he said “turning an honest penny” speculating in the traffic of servant contracts–bonds for white slaves brought here from Europe to serve long terms in the most abject servitude. As an accomplished economist, he was one of the early protagonists of the young colonial capitalism. He was, before the revolution the post-master general of the colonies for many years. After the revolution he served as a diplomat abroad and did many a good turn for American trade and shipping. He was opposed to opening up the lands to the west for free settlement because, as he put it, a man would not work for wages when he could have free land to exploit for himself.

“The Poor Richard” myth that has been built up around this prosperous entrepreneur remains to this day one of the central tenets of the Rotarian and Kiwanis faith. Benjamin Franklin was body and soul a member of the class of merchants and land owners whose sole purpose in revolution was economic freedom–the right to exploit and make profit free from alien restraint.

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SUCH in brief and only too inadequately is the story of five of the fathers. They were all wealthy. They were all aristocrats. They were all exploiters. They modeled a government that served admirably the interests of their class and its heirs to this very day.

What of the toilers? What of the tillers and blacksmiths and carpenters, the workers? They fought the revolution. They were cajoled by the high-sounding and humanitarian phrases of the Declaration of Independence. After the revolution they found their lot unchanged. It was many years before any but the propertied were given the merest rights of suffrage. It was many years before trade unions battled their way out of illegality. The exploitation of the workers in America after the revolution was every whit as intensive as it was before. Debtors’ prisons continued to hold cheated and unfortunate members of the “lower classes.” And on top of all this, a few, the “fathers included,” grew richer and richer in the new freedom that allowed profits to remain in New York, Boston and Philadelphia instead of being scotched by London.

And on every Fourth of July the same tales of epic devotion to liberty and sacrifice for freedom are told. The lineal descendants of that brave band of conspirators who won the freedom of unlimited exploitation keep alive the heroic legends and continue to exploit.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

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