Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 73

The era of American history following the Revolution was dubbed “this critical period” by John Quincy Adams, nephew of patriot Sam Adams, son of John Adams, and himself a future president of the country. During this time, while the states were under the weak union of the Articles, the future of the United States was very much up in the air. The lack of an effective central government meant that the country had difficulty conducting business with other countries and enforcing harmonious trade relations and treaties. Domestic politics was equally difficult. Economic conditions following the war were poor. Many people had debts they could not pay. State taxes were high, and the economy was depressed, offering farmers few opportunities to sell their produce, for example, and hindering those with commercial interests from conducting business as they had before the war.

The radical poverty of some Americans seemed particularly unjust to those hardest hit, especially in light of the rhetoric of the Revolution about equality for all.¹⁶ This is a difficulty of having a narrative controlled from on high—if it doesn’t match up with the reality on the ground, new narratives can develop. Having used “equality” as a rallying cry during the war, the founders were afterward faced with a population that wanted to take equality seriously and eliminate the differences that existed between men.¹⁷ One of the places the American passion for equality manifested itself was in some of the state legislatures, where laws were passed to ease the burden of debtors and farmers. Often the focus of the laws was property, but rather than preserving property, per the Lockean narrative, it frequently was designed to confiscate or redistribute property instead. The “have nots” in society, and the people acting on their behalf, were using the law to redress what they saw as injustices in early American life. To relieve postwar suffering, they printed paper money, seized property, and suspended “the ordinary means for the recovery of debts.”¹⁸ In other words, in those states, people with debts and mortgages could legally escape or postpone paying the money they owed. With so much economic insecurity, naturally those who owned property would not continue to invest and lend money. The Articles of Confederation, in their effort to preserve power for the states, had provided for no checks or limitations on state legislatures. In fact, such actions would have been seen under the Articles as infringing on the sovereignty of the states. What you had was a clash between two visions of what America was to be about.

Profiles in Citizenship Newt Gingrich

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History is anything but dull when it comes from the mouth of the man who has made so much of it. Newt Gingrich is the architect of the “Contract With America,” a document that helped propel the Republicans into the majority in Congress in 1994 for the first time in forty years, and made him Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 1998. He is committed to crafting new ideas out of old lessons, leading his fellow citizens on a mission to restore the country to its fundamental principles. As you will see in Chapter 7, his ideas and the policies they generated still inform the political debate in this country nearly two decades later, a fact that likely encouraged him to make his unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2012.