r/FoundingFathers

The words of the Declaration of Independence, like those of all great revolutionary documents, come suddenly alive in periods of social struggle. Its denunciation of George III, a ruler “marked by every act which may define a Tyrant … unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” reads today like a condemnation of the Trump administration. As the historian Adam Hochschild observed in the webinar held by the World Socialist Web Site on June 25, the Declaration’s indictment of the king reads as if it “were written this morning.”

In the language of the Declaration, the military has been rendered “superior to the Civil Power” through the deployment of troops into American cities. Immigrants are “transported beyond Seas” without charge or trial to a concentration camp in El Salvador. Federal agents are protected “from punishment for any Murders which they should commit,” as in the cases of the ICE agent who shot Renée Good and the CBP agents who shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

The Declaration’s statement that “all men are created equal” stands as an indictment of a society that has just minted its first trillionaire, Elon Musk. Nearly 1,000 billionaires command $8.4 trillion, and the top 1 percent holds as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of the population combined. American society is mired in corruption and criminality, with President Donald Trump having reaped $1.43 billion in a cryptocurrency scam during his first year in office. 

What's the significance of the Declaration of Independence today? Watch "The American Revolution and Its Place in History" at wsws.org/1776

Watch "The American Revolution and Its Place in History", only on the World Socialist Web Site: wsws.org/1776

The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776.

Not after the Declaration of Independence. Not before it. The same year. Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson were writing simultaneously, in different countries, about two different projects. Smith was describing what he called commercial society — the system of trade, labor, and exchange he saw emerging in Britain. Jefferson was helping invent a republic. Neither knew what the other was building, and neither one was finished.

Smith never used the word capitalism. He couldn’t have. The word didn’t exist yet. It wouldn’t enter the English language for another seventy-eight years, and when it finally did, it wasn’t coined by capitalists.

The word capitalism first appears in English in 1854, in William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel The Newcomes, where it just means “having capital.” The modern meaning — the system that encourages capitalists — doesn’t appear until 1872, and the Oxford English Dictionary notes that it “originally was used disparagingly by socialists.” Marx himself barely used the word in Das Kapital, his German monumental work on the system. It appears once in volume 2, which was posthumously edited by Engels.

So capitalism, as a name for an economic system, was coined by socialists in the late nineteenth century as a label for what they opposed. The defenders of capitalism today are using a vocabulary their opponents invented — and they don’t seem know it.

This means the entire framework that pits capitalism against socialism — the binary that has structured American economic argument for a century — was assembled inside socialist thought. Both terms were generated by the same intellectual ferment in the same fifty-year window. The Cold War’s mortal enemies were named by the same hand.

The founders predate all of it. Every single one of them.

Jefferson died in 1826, eight years after Marx was born and twenty-eight years before capitalism entered English at all. Adams died the same day — July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration. Paine died in 1809. Franklin died in 1790. Hamilton died in 1804. Madison, who lived the longest, died in 1836 — still eighteen years before the word capitalism would appear in English for the first time.

When the founders wrote about wealth, property, taxation, inheritance, and the obligations citizens owe one another, they were not taking sides in a debate between capitalism and socialism. That debate did not exist. The vocabulary did not exist. The framework that forces every American economic argument into a binary — and tells working Americans they have to pick a team — was assembled in the century after they died.

What they wrote, they wrote in a vocabulary that hadn’t yet been polluted by the choice we’ve been forced to make. They wrote about the general welfare and the happiness of society and the common good and the aristocracy of moneyed corporations and the unalienable rights of every person. Nobody told them these were left-coded or right-coded ideas. Nobody had invented the codes.

And once you understand that, you understand why so much of what the founders actually wrote sounds, to a modern American ear, like socialism.

It isn’t. It can’t be. Socialism didn’t exist yet.

It’s just what serious people thought a republic required, before someone arrived to tell them which team they were supposed to play for.

The same is true of Smith.

The Adam Smith of modern libertarian iconography — the one quoted to oppose minimum wage laws and progressive taxation and antitrust enforcement — is a twentieth-century construction, mostly assembled by the Chicago School of economics in the 1950s and 60s. The actual Adam Smith of Wealth of Nations was a moral philosopher who had previously written The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book about the centrality of sympathy and benevolence in human nature. The actual Smith wrote, in Book V of Wealth of Nations:

“It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

That’s progressive taxation, written by the man modern libertarians invoke to oppose it.

Smith also wrote that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public” — a direct warning about what we’d now call corporate collusion. He argued for public works that private enterprise wouldn’t profitably produce. He attacked monopolies. He warned that merchants and manufacturers, given political power, would warp public policy to serve their interests. He believed government had genuine obligations to the welfare of the people, not just to the protection of property.

Smith wasn’t a capitalist. The word didn’t exist for him to be one. He was an Enlightenment moral philosopher trying to map the economic life of a commercial society in a way that served human flourishing. He happens to be much closer to Jefferson and Adams than to Milton Friedman.

The libertarian Smith is a fiction. The real Smith was an interlocutor with the founders, not their adversary.

Consider Thomas Jefferson, writing to James Madison from Fontainebleau in October 1785. Jefferson had been the American minister to France for a year. He had taken a walk in the countryside, fallen into conversation with a woman who told him she made the equivalent of pennies a day and could not always feed her children. He had given her what he had in his pocket. Then he went back to his rooms and wrote one of the most consequential letters in American political thought.

The letter is about wealth concentration. Jefferson had been looking at French aristocratic estates — vast holdings, inherited across generations, while peasants starved on the same land. He recognized the structure as a death sentence for any republic that allowed it to develop.

What he proposed to Madison was structural. The most striking passage:

“Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”

Geometric progression. Each higher tier taxed at a rate that grows exponentially, not linearly. A wealth tax designed to accelerate as wealth concentrated, specifically to prevent the dynastic accumulation he had just watched produce starvation in France.

The author of the Declaration of Independence. Writing to the future author of the Constitution. Two years after the end of the Revolution. Proposing what modern American discourse would call socialist wealth taxation.

It isn’t socialist. Marx wouldn’t be born for another thirty-three years.

It’s just what Thomas Jefferson thought a republic needed in order to survive.

Consider Thomas Paine, in Agrarian Justice (1797), the last major work he published before his death in 1809.

Paine was sixty years old, broke, ill, in exile. He had given his American Revolutionary War royalties back to the cause. He had been imprisoned in France during the Terror. He was watching the early American republic consolidate, and he was watching the working poor be left behind by it.

What he proposed was concrete. A one-time payment of fifteen pounds to every person on reaching the age of twenty-one — a stake to begin adult life. An annual pension of ten pounds for every person aged fifty and over — security in old age. Both funded by an inheritance tax on landed property, paid by those who held what civilization had made valuable, to those whose labor had made it valuable.

He called it what he believed it was:

“It is not charity but a right — not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for.”

A form of Universal basic income. Social Security. Inheritance taxes funding both. In structural terms, identical to programs the modern right has spent a century calling un-American.

The man who wrote Common Sense — the pamphlet whose words were read aloud to Washington’s troops at Valley Forge — proposed all three, in 1797, when the vocabulary that would later mark them as socialist did not exist.

He wasn’t a socialist. He couldn’t have been.

He was a founding father who thought civilization owed its members the conditions to live with dignity.

Consider Benjamin Franklin, writing to Robert Morris on Christmas Day, 1783:

“All Property, indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition.”

Read that twice. Property above subsistence is the creature of public convention. The public has the right to regulate it, limit it, and dispose of it whenever the public welfare demands.

The man on the hundred-dollar bill. Writing to one of the richest men in America. Saying that property beyond what a person needs to live belongs, by right, to the public that created it.

In modern American political vocabulary, this is socialism so radical that no sitting senator would say it on a Sunday morning talk show. In 1783, it was a private letter between two founding fathers. Neither thought it was outside the political mainstream of the moment, because the mainstream they were operating in had not yet been redefined by the framework that would later make it unsayable.

And consider John Adams, in Thoughts on Government (1776), defining the purpose of government in language he chose with care:

“The form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.”

Ease. Comfort. Security. As the purpose of government. Not as charity. Not as a handout. As the entire reason We the People came together in the first place.

The man who would become the second president of the United States. Writing three months before the Declaration of Independence. Defining the test by which all governments should be judged — and the test is the material well-being of the greatest number of people.

Modern American discourse has been taught that this is a leftist criterion. That measuring government by whether ordinary people can live with security is some imported European frame. That the real American test is whether individuals have the freedom to fail.

Adams didn’t think so. Adams was an American, in fact a founding American, and the test he proposed in 1776 was material security for the greatest number.

Five voices — Smith, Jefferson, Paine, Franklin, Adams. All writing before 1800. None of them producing in dialogue with capitalism or socialism, because neither category existed as a coherent system of thought.

What did exist, and what they were responding to, was the older and broader question republican government had inherited from Greek and Roman thought, refined through the Enlightenment, and made urgent by the new American project: what does a free people owe one another?

They answered, in different voices and different documents: a great deal. The general welfare. The common good. The happiness of society. Material conditions of dignified life. Structural checks on concentrated wealth that would otherwise destroy the republic from within. Progressive taxation to prevent dynastic accumulation. Public property obligations on the wealthy. Universal old-age security. Investment in education as the foundation of self-government.

These answers were not coded left or right because the codes had not been written. The founders weren’t being progressive. They were being founders. Smith wasn’t being capitalist. He was being a moral philosopher who took commercial society seriously and wanted it to serve human flourishing rather than the powerful.

The framework that would later force every American economic argument into a binary — capitalism versus socialism, free market versus government control, individual liberty versus collective tyranny — was assembled in the century after they died, by people whose interests were served by the binary. Socialists named the enemy capitalism to mark it for opposition. Capitalists eventually accepted the name and made it a badge. Both sides, locked into a framework neither one chose, fighting over a vocabulary their opponents wrote.

The binary serves the people at the top of the accumulated wealth the founders feared. It tells working Americans that any structural response to wealth concentration is an attack on American freedom. It tells working Americans that the policies the founders themselves proposed in their own hands are foreign imports from European philosophers the founders predated. It tells working Americans that wanting healthcare or wage stability or a tax code that doesn’t accelerate dynastic wealth is a betrayal of the country whose founders explicitly proposed all three.

The framework is a lie of chronology. The founders were writing about economic justice before there was a debate to take sides in. They are not on a team. They cannot be on a team. The team didn’t exist. The team is a nineteenth-century invention that has been weaponized against the founders’ actual project.

What this means, if you’ve followed me this far, is that the central American political argument of the last seventy-five years has been conducted inside a frame the founders would not have recognized and would have rejected. The choice between capitalism and socialism is not a founding question. It is a later imposition on an older and more interesting conversation.

That conversation is still available. The documents are still in the archives. Founders Online has the complete papers of Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Washington — every letter, every draft, every revision. The Library of Congress has Jefferson’s original rough draft of the Declaration. The Princeton edition reproduces every stage of every document with annotations. The Massachusetts Constitution is on the state’s official website. Smith’s Wealth of Nations — including the progressive-taxation chapter most libertarians don’t quote — is free in the public domain.

Almost none of it is read.

Instead, what gets transmitted to most Americans is a curated, pre-framed version designed to fit the binary the founders predated. A Jefferson stripped of the wealth-tax letter. A Paine stripped of Agrarian Justice. A Franklin stripped of the Morris letter. An Adams stripped of his definition of happiness. A Smith stripped of his progressive taxation, his attacks on monopoly, and his moral philosophy. The founders and their interlocutors have been edited down to make them safe for the team that needed them on its side.

The work of reading what they actually wrote — in their own hands, in the actual documents, in the moments they were writing — is the work of recovering an American political tradition that predates the choice we’ve been told we have to make.

It is older than capitalism. It is older than socialism. It is older than the framework that uses both terms to keep working people fighting each other instead of looking at where the wealth has gone.

It is, in the founders’ own words, the general welfare.

And it has been the American project, in its founding documents, since 1776 — when capitalism hadn’t been named yet, socialism hadn’t been invented, and the people building the republic were writing in a vocabulary nobody had yet taught them to police.

Two hundred and fifty years after the Continental Congress proclaimed the Declaration of Independence, American democracy confronts its gravest crisis since the Civil War. The democratic principles proclaimed in Philadelphia in July 1776—that all men are created equal, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that the people retain the right to abolish any government that becomes destructive of these ends—are being trampled by a government controlled by a financial-corporate oligarchy. At the same time, political and social resistance to the assault on democracy is being undermined by the claim that there is nothing in the historical legacy of the American Revolution worth defending.

While rejecting simplistic nationalist myth-making, the standpoint of this webinar is that the American Revolution was a world-historic event. Despite its historically determined limitations, contradictions, and compromises, the American Revolution set into motion a global wave of democratic revolutions. It led inexorably to the destruction of slavery in the United States and the emergence of a new epoch of struggle for the emancipation of the working class.

The webinar will feature a distinguished panel of historians who have written extensively on the complex legacy of the American Revolution: James Oakes, Richard Carwardine, Sean Wilentz, Adam Hochschild, and Thomas Mackaman. The webinar will be moderated by David North, International Editor of the World Socialist Web Site.

We ought to consider what is the end of government, before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the Happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the Happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow, that the form of government which communicates Ease, Comfort, Security, or, in one word, Happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.”
— John Adams, Thoughts on Government 1776

The "pursuit of Happiness" isn't the squishy part of the Declaration. The Founder who shaped that document defined the word — and the definition is economic security.

I grew up thinking "pursuit of Happiness" was the weak link in the Declaration. The feelings part. The line Jefferson tossed in because "life, liberty, and property" sounded too cold. I was raised about as far right as you can be raised, and that's how we read it: happiness is a mood, property is a right, don't confuse the two.

I was wrong, and the man who proved me wrong was John Adams.

Months before the Declaration, Adams wrote Thoughts on Government (1776). He spells out what government is actually for:

"the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or in one word Happiness to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best."

"Happiness" isn't the vague word in that sentence. It's the summary word. Adams puts the definition right in front of it: ease, comfort, security. He's telling you that the best government is the one that delivers material security to the most people, and he's calling that happiness.

That's not my gloss. It's a definition, in one sentence, in his own hand — and Adams's Thoughts on Government was demonstrably circulating among the Virginia framers before they wrote their own founding documents. This was mainstream founding thought.

So when someone says a person working full-time shouldn't be one ER bill away from ruin — that isn't smuggling in a foreign ideology. That's the Adams standard, stated in 1776: ease, comfort, security, to the greatest number.

The Founders weren't vague about Happiness. We just stopped reading them and let other people tell us what they said.

Receipts: John Adams, Thoughts on Government (1776), Founders Online (National Archives), founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0026-0004.