Monday, October 19, 2009

Were the founding fathers democratic reformers?

After reading both view points of John P. Roche and Howard Zinn, I felt like there were more things to back up the arguments made by Zinn, which is one of the reasons why I think that the founding fathers were not in fact democratic reformers. First off, many of the founding fathers were wealthy, came from good families and were well educated. Howard Zinn states that the founding fathers based the Constitution off of their own personal experiences without considering the past experiences of the average citizen. That does not mean that they were completely selfish and based the whole Constitution around them, it just means that many of their economic interests were reflected in the Constitution itself. He goes on about how economic interests were seen in the clauses of the Constitution and the founding fathers had a direct economic interest in forming a strong central government. According to Zinn, the founding fathers thought factions came from inequalities in wealth. Further into the reading he said that the Constitution was meerly the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privilages while giving enough rights and reason to the people to get a majority to support them.

I think that Zinn's arguments were backed up very well with information or logistic examples. I think that the founding fathers were democratic reformers to a certain extent but in the Constitution, minorities such as slaves, indentured servants, women and men without property were not really mentioned which kind of shows that the Constitution was aimed for more of the elite class, usually all who had plenty of wealth and heald a good social status. I feel like the Constitution wasn't written to all types of citizens of America and that economics were the foundation of the Constitution. Zinn's arguments did show that Shay's Rebellion was a call for a stronger government. Since the central government was so weak, the founding fathers realized a change had to be made. Zinn also states that the Constitution was a compromise between various disputes but its real purpose was to unite the states to create a great market for commerce.