Posted on 01/31/2016 9:22:16 AM PST by Pelham
"As an interpreter of American constitutional government, McDonald has achieved a national reputation among historians, statesmen, and the literary public that began with the publication of We The People in 1958. Respected historians David M. Potter and C. Vann Woodward praised We The People in the pages of the Saturday Review and the New York Times, and shortly after the book's publication McDonald appeared on NBC's "Continental Classroom" television show. He delivered dozens of talks across the country during the bicentennial celebration of the Constitution, and in the 1980s Novus Ordo Seclorum was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 1987, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) called upon McDonald to serve as the sixteenth Thomas Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities. McDonald has met privately with at least three American presidents and has provided congressional testimony in two of the most significant episodes in modern history: the 1987 Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination hearings in the U.S. Senate and the impeachment proceedings held by the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives against President Bill Clinton in 1998, where he testified on the background and history of impeachment."
"In declaring independence and in forming a government, McDonald argues in Novus, the founders adhered to no single intellectual theory or political theorist. Rather, they spoke a common political and legal language derived from the authors they all had read: Polybius, Cato, John Locke, William Blackstone, Montesquieu, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, James Harrington, David Hume. They drew selectively on these thinkers whenever convenient to buttress their arguments. Indeed, the framers of the Constitution, McDonald demonstrates, never let established political theory or intellectual consistency stand in the way of a good, practical solution to a thorny political/constitutional problem. An example is Hamilton's articulation of the idea of "divided sovereignty" to justify the Constitution's division of power between the state and the federal governments, each being supreme in its own sphere. Such an arrangement contradicted the great English legal scholar Blackstone's admonition that supreme lawmaking authority can rest only in one place. McDonald sees the framers as ultimately practical men-that is, men like himself-who trusted historical experience above speculative theory...."
Once that sovereignty is violated, its difficult to return to independence. Even Ben Franklin noticed the big fishes tend to eat the little ones. It makes sense that Mary sang, "Fecit potentiam."
McDonald, Wood, Eidelberg and certainly others confronted and demolished the progressive hit piece by Beard.
Thanks for this. I have read a bit of McDonald. In fact, in at least one of the attempts by our Congress to amend the eligibility restrictions OUT of our Constitution, McDonald made a statement against doing such a thing.
“Thanks for this. I have read a bit of McDonald.”
I’ve read five or six of his books. Always a pleasure, there’s nothing Forrest McDonald wrote that fails to be interesting. David Hackett Fischer is another historian well worth reading.
I would guess he was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest. He died on Robert E. Lee's birthday.
“I would guess he was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest. He died on Robert E. Lee’s birthday. “
Good call and good catch.
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