Myths About the Founding
(NPR Commentary)
By Dinesh D'Souza

For me, president’s day is a good occasion to celebrate George Washington and the American founding. Washington and the other founders who gathered in Philadelphia wanted America to be a “new order for the ages,” and they have succeeded beyond their imagining. The United States is today the economic, political and cultural guiding light of the world, and the magnet for immigrants from every continent. Without exaggeration, we are living in what may be termed Planet America.

I frequently lecture at American high schools and colleges, and I must acknowledge that many educators do not share my enthusiasm for the founding. “The constitution was a racist document,” they say. “After all, it says that a black person is three-fifths of a human being.” I hear this all the time. Some teachers allege that even their good ideas the founders plagiarized from nonwhites. “They stole all their ideas from the Iroquois Indians,” a history teacher informed. I expressed surprise: “You mean,” I said, “that concepts like free elections, separation of powers, checks and balances and freedom of speech and religion were all invented and practiced by the Iroquois?”

“Absolutely,” I was told. And then, in a condescending tone: “Maybe it’s time you went home and did your homework.”

Well, I have done my homework, and here are the facts. The notorious three-fifths clause of the constitution, the central exhibit in the claim that the document is racist, in fact reflects no denial of the equal worth of African Americans. Indeed the three-fifths clause has nothing to say about the intrinsic worth of any individual or group. It arose in the context of a debate between the northern and southern states over the issue of political representation.

It turns out that the South wanted to count blacks as whole persons in order to increase its political power. The North wanted to count blacks as nothing, not for the purpose of rejecting their humanity, but in order to preserve and strengthen the anti-slavery majority in Congress. It was not a pro-slavery southerner but an anti-slavery northerner, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who proposed the three-fifths compromise.

The effect of the compromise was to limit the south’s political representation and thus its ability to protect the institution of slavery. Frederick Douglass, the great black abolitionist, understood this. He praised the three-fifths clause “a downright disability laid upon the slave-holding states” depriving them of “two-fifths of their natural basis of representation.” So the notion that the three-fifths clause demonstrates the racism of the Constitution is both wrong and unfair.

And what about those Iroquois? It turns out that there was an Iroquois League that had been formed to adjudicate disputes between warring tribes. Sometimes the group’s efforts at mediation failed, but in general the League was reasonably successful in keeping the peace.

Benjamin Franklin heard about the Iroquois League, and he wrote a letter to the framers in Philadelphia. Here is what he said: if a group of savages can learn to settle their disputes without killing each other, surely we civilized men can get together and agree upon a constitution. I feel a bit embarrassed to say this to a history teacher, but this is pretty much the extent of the connection between the Iroquois and the American founding.

The truth of the matter is that the founders produced a constitution that enshrined the noble principles of liberty and equality under the law. These were principles higher than the practices that the founders saw around them, higher than the practices of some of the founders themselves. Yet it is their notion that we are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights that provided the moral basis for the war that ended slavery, and for the civil rights movement as well. We who are minorities in this society owe these dead white men a debt of gratitude.

(See also: What’s So Great About America and The End of Racism)