The Triple Package (45 page)

“City upon a Hill”
:
George McKenna,
The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 6–7.

“reserved to the people of this country”
:
Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist 1” (1787), in Jack N. Rakove, ed.,
The Federalist by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay: The Essential Essays
(Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2003), p. 36.

“the Israel of our time”
:
Herman Melville,
White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War
, in
Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick
(New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 506.

exhorting his hunter friends
:
Dugatkin,
Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose,
pp. ix–xii; see also Mark V. Barrow Jr.,
Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 15–9; Boehm and Schwartz, “Jefferson and the Theory of Degeneracy.”

sent one proof after another
:
See Howard C. Rice Jr., “Jefferson’s Gift of Fossils to the Museum of Natural History in Paris,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Survey
95, no. 6 (1951), pp. 597–627.

Notes on Virginia
:
Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on Virginia,” in Paul Leicester Ford, ed.,
The Works of Thomas Jefferson
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), vol. 3, pp. 411-5 (discussing the “tremendous” mammoth); pp. 422–4 (chart comparing animals in Europe and America).

wrote an entire book
:
Richard L. Bushman, “The Romance of Andrew Carnegie,”
American Studies
6, no. 1 (1965), pp. 36–7; Andrew Carnegie,
Triumphant Democracy
(New York: J. Little & Co. 1886).

“the most self-conscious people”
:
Henry James,
Hawthorne
(1887)
(New York: AMS Press, 1968), p. 153.

no “stations”
:
Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy
in
America
, trans. Henry Reeve (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), vol. 2, part III, chap. 14, p. 262; see also ibid., chap. 21, pp. 301–2 (noting that in America, nothing keeps men “settled in their station,” that “every man, finding himself possessed of some education and some resources, may choose his own path, and proceed apart from all his fellow-men,” and that “there is no longer a race of poor men . . . [or] a race of rich men”).

“longing to rise”
:
Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America,
trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner, vol. 2, part III, chap. 19 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 603.

Franklin’s parents were Puritan
:
See Walter Isaacson,
Benjamin
Franklin
:
An
American
Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003) pp. 5–15, 526, n. 35.

“Industry, Perseverance & Frugality”
:
“Poor Richard for 1744,” in Paul Leicester Ford, ed.
, The Prefaces, Proverbs, and Poems of Benjamin Franklin Originally Printed in Poor Richard’s Almanacs for 1733–1758
(New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons), p. 147.

“Dost thou love Life”
 . . . “There are no Gains” . . . “Leisure is Time”:
“Poor Richard for 1758: Preface,” in Ford,
The Prefaces
, pp. 270, 271, 273.

“No man e’er was glorious”
:
“Poor Richard for 1734,” in Ford,
The Prefaces
, p. 38.

“Be at War with your Vices”
:
“Poor Richard for 1755,” in Ford,
The Prefaces
, p. 245.

“To lengthen thy life”
:
“Poor Richard for 1733,” in Ford,
The Prefaces
, p. 28.

“He that can have patience”
 . . . “Diligence is the mother of good luck”:
“Poor Richard for 1736,” in Ford,
The Prefaces
, pp. 61, 62.

antiauthoritarian ferment
:
See, e.g., Akhil Reed Amar,
The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 21, 23, 46, 79; see generally Gordon S. Wood,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991).

“loosened the bonds”
:
Claude S. Fischer,
Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 110 (quoting John Adams).

More wives
 . . . College students . . . Young couples:
Ibid., pp. 111–2.

A third of the brides
:
Ibid., p. 113.

“a country of beginnings”
:
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Nature: Addresses and Lectures
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1903), p. 371.

Alexander Hamilton
:
Ashamed of his illegitimate origins, Hamilton “decided to cut himself off from the past and forge a new identity. He would find a home where he would be accepted for what he did, not for who he was.” Ron Chernow,
Alexander Hamilton
(New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), p. 40.

“With the past”
:
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The
Journals
and
Miscell
aneous
Notebooks
of
Ralph
Waldo
Emerson
,
1838–1842
(Boston: Harvard University Press, 1969) p. 241.

“[T]he earth belongs to the living”
:
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (Sept. 6, 1789), in Julian P. Boyd, ed.,
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 15, 27 March 1789 to 30 November 1789
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), p. 396; Jed Rubenfeld,
Freedom and Time
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 18–21.

unprecedented experiment, which many expected to fail
:
Gordon S. Wood,
The American Revolution: A History
(New York: Modern Library, 2002), pp. 139–46; see also Michael J. G. Cain and Keith L. Dougherty, “Suppressing Shays’ Rebellion: Collective Action and Constitutional Design Under the Articles of Confederation,”
Journal of Theoretical Politics
11, no. 2 (1999), pp. 233–60 (discussing the “constitutional failures associated with the Articles of Confederation”—especially the “collective action problem”—which were “solved by the new Constitution”).

full of lawlessness, ineffectual government
:
Gordon S. Wood,
The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 367–9; Cain and Dougherty, “Suppressing Shay’s Rebellion,” pp. 233–4.

close to anarchy
:
See Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist 15” (1787), in Rakove,
The
Federalist
, p. 65 (“It must in truth be acknowledged that . . . there are material imperfections in our national system, and that something is necessary to be done to rescue us from impending anarchy.”); Richard Sylla,
The Rise of Securities Markets: What Can Government Do?
(The World Bank: November 1995), pp. 6–7 (describing the disarray when the Articles of Confederation governed).

But if the majority themselves turned tyrant
:
See, e.g., James Madison, “Note to His Speech on the Right of Suffrage” (1821), in Max Farrand, ed.,
The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Volume III
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), pp. 450, 452 (warning of the “danger” to “the rights of property” posed by universal suffrage “whenever the Majority shall be without landed . . . property”); Wood,
The Creation of the American Republic
, pp. 409–11; Morton J. Horwitz, “Tocqueville and the Tyranny of the Majority,”
The Review of Politics
28, no. 3 (1966), p. 293 (“the problem of tyranny of the majority had dominated the political thought of no other nation as it had that of America”); cf. Charles A. Beard,
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
(New York: MacMillan Co., 1952), pp. 15–18 (speculating that the Constitution’s Framers may have been chiefly concerned with protecting their own property from majoritarian appropriation).

“passions
 . . . of the public”:
James Madison, “Federalist 49” (1788), in Rakove,
The Federalist
, pp. 130–3.

“Constitutions are chains”
:
John E. Finn,
Constitutions in Crisis: Political Violence and the Rule of Law
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 5 (quoting U.S. Senator John Potter Stockton in debates over the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871); see Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1861 (“A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations . . . is the only true sovereign of a free people”); David J. Brewer, “An Independent Judiciary as the Salvation of the Nation” (1893), reprinted in
The Annals of America: Agrarianism and Urbanization 1884–1894
(1968), vol. 11, pp. 423, 428 (“Constitutions . . . are rules proscribed by Philip sober to control Philip drunk”); Thomas M. Cooley,
A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union
(Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1868), pp. 54–5 (Constitution protects against “the danger that the legislature will be influenced by temporary excitements and passions among the people”); Stephen Holmes,
Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chap. 5; cf. Akhil Reed Amar, “The Central Meaning of Republican Government: Popular Sovereignty, Majority Rule, and the Denominator Problem,”
University of Colorado Law Review
65 (1994), p. 761 (noting the widely held view that “the Bill of Rights was designed to inhibit majority tyranny and limit popular passion” but pointing out that the Constitution was also designed to restrict wayward legislators and presidents).

structure and restraint
:
William J. Brennan Jr., “Construing the Constitution,”
University of California, Davis Law Review
19, p. 6 (“It is the very purpose of a Constitution—and particularly of the Bill of Rights—to declare certain values transcendent, beyond the reach of temporary political majorities. The majoritarian process cannot be expected to rectify claims of minority right that arise as a response to the outcomes of that very majoritarian process”); Wood,
The Creation of the American Republic
, p. 453.

powerful national government
:
Wood,
The American Revolution
, p. 151 (noting that the Constitution created an “extraordinarily powerful national government” that “possessed far more than the additional congressional powers that were required to solve the United States’ difficulties in credit, commerce, and foreign affairs”); Wood,
The Creation of the American Republic
, p. 467; see generally Akhil Reed Amar,
America’s Constitution: A Biography
(New York: Random House, 2005).

tyranny
:
See Hannah Arendt,
On Revolution
(London: Penguin, 1965), p. 233 (describing Jefferson’s view).

“a more perfect Union”
:
United States Constitution, preamble.

A great many Americans believed
:
See Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,”
American
Political
Science
Review
87, no. 3 (1993), p. 549 (“For over 80% of U.S. history, its laws declared most of the world’s population to be ineligible for American citizenship solely because of their race, original nationality, or gender. . . . [At the time of the Founding,] [m]en were thought naturally suited to rule over women. . . . White northern Europeans were thought superior culturally—and probably biologically—to black Africans, bronze Native Americans, and indeed all other races and civilizations. Many British Americans also treated religions as an inherited condition and regarded Protestants as created by God to be morally and politically, as well as theologically, superior to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and others”); Thurgood Marshall, “Reflections on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution,”
H
arvard
Law
Review
101 (1987), pp. 1–5; Ellen Carol DuBois, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878,”
T
he
Journal
of
Americ
an
History
74 (1987), pp. 836–62.

stains on American history
:
See, e.g., Mary Frances Berry,
Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America
(New York: Penguin Books, 1994) (discussing discrimination and racial violence that has persisted over the past century and a half, afflicting blacks as well as Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans); Robert A. Williams Jr.,
Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) (criticizing the racist roots of federal Indian law); Jose Monsivais, “A Glimmer of Hope: A Proposal to Keep the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 Intact,”
American Indian Law Review
22 (1997), p. 2 (“When Andrew Jackson became President of the United States in 1829, the policy of removal began. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was enacted to relocate most of the eastern tribes west of the Mississippi river. . . . Vast numbers of American Indians were marched westward onto lands considered unfit for human life”); Andrew Gyory,
Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act
(Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); William D. Carrigan, “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928,”
Journal of Social History
37, no. 2 (2003), pp. 411–38.