The Feuding Fathers

by KYW's Dr. Marciene Mattleman

The spring primaries, the hearings of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan and the Tea Parties have many lamenting the partisan venom of politics.  Ron Chernow, in an essay titled "The Feuding Fathers" in The Wall Street Journal, points out that our country's founders were in "a league of their own."

He asserts that despite their integrity and philosophical genius, they were men who expressed their beliefs with vehemence and vitriolic rhetoric. Although Thomas Paine was an early admirer of Washington, he denounced him as President openly in a public letter.

While there were no parties as we know them, Hamilton Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, in Chernow's words "trafficked on a conspiratorial view of politics," attacking one another in the press. Ben Franklin's grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, in an opposition paper, the Aurora, questioned Washington's loyalty to the country.

Conflicts abounded over States' rights versus federal power, an agrarian economy versus one intermixed with finance and manufacturing, favoring France versus England when they went to war against each other.  It wasn't until Andrew Jackson's time that presidents became "chieftains;" but today it's clear that political rancor lives.