Posted on 12/16/2007 10:23:05 AM PST by BGHater
Congress Pressed on Founders' Papers
More than 200 years after they were written, huge portions of the papers of America's founding fathers are still decades away from being published, prompting a distinguished group of scholars and federal officials to pressure Congress to speed the process along.
Teams of experts have been laboring since Harry Truman was president in the late 1940s to compile and annotate the letters, correspondence and documents of George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. About $58 million has been spent in the past 30 years alone.
Yet, according to a study by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the Washington papers will not be finished until 2023, with 54 volumes published and 35 more to go. The Adams papers, 29 volumes shy of the planned 59-volume set, will not be done until 2050.
Only the papers of Alexander Hamilton have been finished, largely because scholars did not have as many papers to comb through. Hamilton died at age 49 after a duel with Aaron Burr.
An assortment of highbrow lobbyists -- led by the Pew Charitable Trusts, and including presidential historian David McCullough, the librarian of Congress and the archivist of the United States -- have been trying to persuade lawmakers to allocate more funds for the effort, known as the Founding Fathers Project. They also want Congress to demand that the papers, as well as the scholarship that accompanies them, be much more widely distributed, especially online.
"I feel very strongly that this is as worthy as any publishing effort that I know of," said McCullough, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. "It's just a shame that it is taking so long."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
What could be the holdup?
I’m waiting for the letter to Jefferson by Adams that says, “What’s this ‘wall of separation’ bit, Tom? You weren’t even in the country when we did the Constitution. Spell it out right — we’re in to ‘secularist’ government compared to dopey Europe’s theocratic State Church administration, but we’re also all about government being a dynamic area of responsibility for Christians and Christian principles, just as with every other earthly responsiblity. Better issue a clarification, dude.”
Just scan it all and post it on the Internet.
The “power of the People.”
At the risk of sounding cynical, 15 more years of job security.
“But the Pew-led lobbyists are not satisfied that enough has been accomplished, especially McCullough, who does not believe that a quicker completion would sacrifice quality. Instead, he blames the slow progress on “the little fiefdoms of each project, which have been working in their own way in their world for over two generations.”
“I liken this all to the Washington Monument, which ran out of money and stood there on the Mall like a giant marble stump,” he said. “Finally, they went ahead and finished it.”
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I’m with author McCullough (one of those “popular historians” the academics like to look down their noses at). Digitize the papers, put ‘em on the web, and let the larger public “annotate” them wiki style.
Somebody ought to plant a suggestion with the Democrat leadership that some of those papers could prove that the 2nd Amendment only meant the militia, not individual gun ownership. They’d authorize the money to try to prove that in a New York Minute. Of course, they’ll find out it’s not true, but that’s too dang bad! ;o)
Figures. The centralized (much more centralized than the Framers would have advocated) government of course would publish the papers from the worthless man that most advocated its existence in this form. Don't worry Alex, the mainstream of both parties are working their hardest to get you the elected monarchy you once advocated...
Recall that when the Dead Sea Scrolls where put under the control of a group of academics to prepare for publication, there was a similarly endless delay in releasing the final product.
The difference here is that the Left is free to lecture the rest of us about important concepts that are vital to understand the meaning of key parts of the Constitution and Bill of Rights (such as “militia”, “reasonable search”, etc), while further historical facts that shed further light on them remain locked in some academic’s filing cabinet.
If past behavior and ideological bias is any guide, I am willing to wager that one of the reasons there is no hurry to publish these papers is the academics who know what they say don’t want to “confuse” the public or “complicate” the Left’s ability to continue to shape the Republic the way it pleases.
I don’t say this lightly. If the academics who are conducting this scholarship are representative of academics as a whole, according to a poll published by the Media Research Center, they would have voted by a ratio of 12 to 1 for John Kerry.
see:
http://www.mrc.org/biasbasics/pdf/BiasBasics.pdf
I agree.
***What could be the holdup?***
Good words for the citizens, bad things for the federal government.
Of course, any such evidence will be “fake but accurate.” They might get the type fonts to match this time /sarc
Let me add that the link I posted to a PDF by the MRC is about the bias in the media, not bias in academia. I will leave it to fellow forum members to decide if that is a material difference, as sad as it makes me to suggest that that it isn’t.
I'm saddened by the fact as well.
You can only be hit upside the head by a two-by-four for so long.
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