Our Founding Fathers? -- Our Founding Multitudes!

So much credit has been given to the Founding Fathers, and rightly so, but they didn't do it single-handedly. They needed the support of the multitudes, and it was the multitudes who carried out their democratic covenant with the People from that generation to this.We've got our Sons and Daughters of the Revolution, Sons and Daughters of the Civil War. The Founding Fathers, other than mostly being well-off, were a motley group. Many of them scholars, some of them were military men, some of them were farmers (in the entrepreneurial sense), some of them were urban businessmen, inventors, shipping entrepreneurs, pressmen, high craftsmen. They represented a fair cross-section of our society at the time. Most of them were also very well-educated in political philosophy, economics, foreign languages, and principles of natural science. Many of them were religious, but never so much as to interfere with their belief in, study and implementation of scientific principles. For many, making a living was about achieving the leisure to pursue their true interests, which were scholarly, philosophical, literary and scientific. These gentlemen can be called "plain "or "simple" men only by comparison to certain social counterparts in England, who by comparison, were sometimes somewhat decadent and cynical on the European side of the English-speaking equation. So our Founding Fathers were idealists, and if that is provincial, then so be it. Their ideals were cosmopolitan in terms of the universal expectations they had for the spread of democracy. Recently people have tried to portray them as just "businessmen" who wanted to create a form of government (presumably democracy) that would enable them to more freely pursue their business interests. This is quite putting the cart before the horse. These men could have flourished economically had they not lifted a finger in rebellion to George III. No, they were thinking of the welfare of the multitudes, who were ready to join them. You see, the multitudes were fleeing troubles, such as political impotence, poverty, religious persecution by Official State (Sectarian) Religion. The many regular people who settled in America had one or two things at the forefront of their minds: a means to make a living so that they could set up a happy family life and a means to worship (or not worship) as they pleased in the fashion most comfortable for them individually. Many were debtor slaves, many belonged to persecuted sects whose resulting social ostracism kept them from decent employment, many were the victims of legal chicanery. Many were landless looking for a means to buy a simple homestead for a humble (yet untroubled) means of subsistence. Their ambitions were not great, but they wanted freedom and a stable (and protected) financial existence. That was why they fought in the Revolution, and they got land-grants for their service. Now we should talk about the Sons and Daughters of Ellis Island. They came by the millions from the middle of the nineteenth century until the beginning of World War I. Their sheer numbers enabled the Industrial Revolution to move into high gear, filling the spots needed in the big factories and mines, and in the construction and maintenance of a national transportation network of modern bridges and railroads. This second major wave of immigration came as the result again of religious persecution in Europe, but also because of a quashing of upward mobility by an alliance of old aristocracy and the nouveau rich in Europe who were benefiting from market speculation in global and regional industrial enterprises and wanted to keep the economic pie-slices few and fat in portion. When these mostly Irish, Eastern and Southern European immigrants came in this second major migration, they demanded that the rights and privileges of democracy and economic enfranchisement be extended to them once they established themselves in America. They were instrumental in enabling the Union Movement take on real strength, and voted in droves as their most prized right of citizenship. City life was liberalized, and the spirit of liberalism spread to the rural regions of productivity and transportation that supported the industry and high cultural life of the cities. So let us, with our great American poet Walt Whitman, sing songs of praise for our Founding Multitudes, without whom our Founding Fathers and Great American Figures would have had no legs to stand on.