More On Madison Et Al

I neglected to include a link to Paul Finkelman's excellent paper James Madison and the Bill of Rights:  A Reluctant Paternity so am giving one now.  It contains a lot of information that overturns the common received bullshit about a number of the most famous of the founders as egalitarian democrats, especially Madison and Hamilton - currently there is no one more distorted in the popular imagination than Hamilton due to that idiotic dance and rap piece of crap that was so heavily promoted by that other piece of crap, the New York Times and the money interests of the NYC area. 

It is especially interesting in the section in which historians addressing Madison et al's hostility to the adoption of a bill of rights try to give practical reasons of lack of time and complexity.   Finkelman notes that it was as late, even later in the process of consideration that

The first proposal for civil liberties protections came before the Convention on August 20, when Charles Pinckney suggested libertarian additions to the Constitution. This was late in the Convention but certainly not too late for action. The contrast with the Fugitive Slave Clause, which was for Black Americans the antithesis of a bill of rights, is revealing. Charles Pinckney and Pierce Butler introduced this clause on August 28. The Convention adopted it the next day, after almost no debate, even though Americans had virtually no prior experience with the interstate rendition of fugitive slaves. The delegates, then, were clearly capable of swiftly and decisively expanding the Constitution even at the end of the Convention. 

 The lack of time argument is especially unpersuasive in Madison’s case. On September 14, three days before final adjournment, Madison proposed giving Congress two new substantive powers: to grant charters of incorporation and to create a national university. That day Madison also supported a change in the wording of the Article I to discourage standing armies. Clearly Madison was willing to make changes late in the Convention, but a bill of rights was not on his agenda.

The common received wisdom that James Madison was burning with the desire to include a Bill of Rights in the Constitution is bull shit.  The ahistorical piety of the kind that for even those with college credentials replaces pious hagiographic lies for history based in a careful and complete inclusion of the most complete possible primary evidence and - in one of the most valuable parts of the modern historian's art and science, critical analyses of the virtues and hypocrisies of the figures in history. 

I will call your attention to Professor Hinkelman's text in which he noted that for a huge portion of the American population, Madison and the rest of the founders adopted and installed in the body of the Constitution proper, an antithesis of a bill of rights.  That is so righteously beautiful a telling of truth, it takes my breath away.

You can read in his paper how Madison was very reluctantly forced into supporting a Bill of Rights be adopted by the Congress, ironically enough in today's common received wisdom, because he a. faced the necessity of being elected to offices, the Virginia ratifying Convention, first and then for political office, for which he needed, b. the endorsement of two influential Baptist ministers who were skeptical of the Constitution without a Bill of Rights and so he had to be dragged against his will into the role that central casting has put him in as the Father of the Bill of Rights.  Add into that the fact that Massachusetts was insisting on such a Bill of Rights.  Remember this the next time you're reading the generally estimable Charles Pierce when he waxes silly over "Jemmy Madison."*   I have pointed out before that Madison's cameo image is the emblem of the American Federalist fascists with good reason.   You can read his contempt for the hoi polloi in regard to their insistence on a Bill of Rights, how the Founders, largely, if not to a man, held people without propery, without a formal education in contempt, how they were largely and entirely bent on empowering the aristocracy they planned on setting up after not needing all of that 18th century romance about the Creator endowing people with unalienable right on an equal basis.   I would refer you to exactly the ease with which they cemented slavery into the foul document.

I am becoming ever more interested in the history of those who opposed the Constitution and what remains of what they said.  I think, given the disaster and danger that the Constitution has allowed us to fall into and which it is so hard to remove, the long history of corrupt presidents, courts and congresses, it's probably a good time to consider that those who both as it was being adopted and after who addressed the horrors and injustices that were allowable under the thing might have known what they were talking about and that we've been gulled into just accepting that because the CON-STI-TU-TION** is treated as secular sacred writ.  

We got Trump, we still have Trump, for all we know now, Trump might get in again.  And if the hoi polloi that Madison and his allies so despised are to blame for being deceived, it is because of the idiotic way in which those casually considered words of the Bill or Rights, largely drafted by men on record as believing they were superfluous or dangerous, are to blame for that.

Note:  I have to wonder if a good part of Madison's and the other Fedederalists' reluctance to call attention to rights in such an explicit way was due in no small part to them systematically denying rights to those they exploited as property as bad and much worse than the European peasants and serfs were treated by the feudal powers that they held themselves to be better than.  It's certainly article number one in the case for the their sainthood being impeached.  That's been known since the late 18th century even before the Revolution though the way university historians have written it for most of the intervening years, that has been entirely disappeared.  It is largely the writings of those who escaped slavery, the abolitionists and others who have told the truth about that.   

The founders weren't gods, they weren't saints, they weren't even, by and large democrats.  They were certainly not guilty of committing equal justice before the law.  A world ruled by white men, even in the expansion of the franchise that, as well, came well after the Constitution, scholars and universities largely either consisting of such privileged white men or knowing they were answerable to the power structures that consisted of them might have found it possible and desirable to pretend they were.  But that's over.  At least for people who reject anything but equality and democratic rule by people of good will.   It is absurd that we live under the superstition that we are bound by their words, today. 

You can read in his paper how Madison was very reluctantly forced into supporting a Bill of Rights be adopted by the Congress, ironically enough in today's common received wisdom, because he a. faced the necessity of being elected to offices, the Virginia ratifying Convention, first and then for political office, for which he needed, b. the endorsement of two influential Baptist ministers who were skeptical of the Constitution without a Bill of Rights and so he had to be dragged against his will into the role that central casting has put him in as the Father of the Bill of Rights.  Add into that the fact that Massachusetts was insisting on such a Bill of Rights.  Remember this the next time you're reading the generally estimable Charles Pierce when he waxes silly over "Jemmy Madison."*   I have pointed out before that Madison's cameo image is the emblem of the American Federalist fascists with good reason.   You can read his contempt for the hoi polloi in regard to their insistence on a Bill of Rights, how the Founders, largely, if not to a man, held people without propery, without a formal education in contempt, how they were largely and entirely bent on empowering the aristocracy they planned on setting up after not needing all of that 18th century romance about the Creator endowing people with unalienable right on an equal basis.   I would refer you to exactly the ease with which they cemented slavery into the foul document.

I am becoming ever more interested in the history of those who opposed the Constitution and what remains of what they said.  I think, given the disaster and danger that the Constitution has allowed us to fall into and which it is so hard to remove, the long history of corrupt presidents, courts and congresses, it's probably a good time to consider that those who both as it was being adopted and after who addressed the horrors and injustices that were allowable under the thing might have known what they were talking about and that we've been gulled into just accepting that because the CON-STI-TU-TION** is treated as secular sacred writ.  

We got Trump, we still have Trump, for all we know now, Trump might get in again.  And if the hoi polloi that Madison and his allies so despised are to blame for being deceived, it is because of the idiotic way in which those casually considered words of the Bill or Rights, largely drafted by men on record as believing they were superfluous or dangerous, are to blame for that.

*  It is largely on "The First Amendment" and its usefulness for the scribbling profession and publishing industry - the "press" that the slave-owning aristocrat Madison is deified, today.   This passage from the paper also jumped out at me. When he reported to Edmund Randolph the growing opposition to the Constitution over “the ommission of the provisions contended for the favor of the Press, & Juries &c.,” Madison again failed to comment on the validity of the argument or to propose a strategy for combating it. 

**  I recently went back to look at Barbara Jordan's famous speech made as part of the Nixon impeachment and noted that her expressed faith in the CON-STI-TU-TION! was conditional on it being interpreted as she understood it in the early 1970s, which were the high mark of the effort to make out of that mess an egalitarian document.  That is what the entire subsequent history of the Supreme Court, the Republican fascists, the Federalist fascists, much of popular culture have been tearing down ever since then.   I wish Barbara Jordan and some of the others who said such things at that time were around to ask questions about this today.  I can't believe she would have expressed such total faith in the document given the history of the last forty-five years.