1. 1st big surge in reverence for the Founders comes from the mid-1820s to the late 1860s, as their generation died out & the country contested the meaning of their legacy. Washington Monument begun in 1848. Lots of places named for the Founders - Washington territory in 1853.https://twitter.com/jdmortenson/status/1374119144610791424 …
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2. As my response last night
@NRO noted, Lincoln was a great proponent of both reverence for the Founders & original meaning of the Constitution. So was Andrew Jackson, who was a Southerner but a Union man to his bones.https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/american-history-deserves-better-than-a-google-word-search/ …1 reply 1 retweet 11 likesShow this thread -
3. The Jacksonians & the antislavery constitutionalists had quite different visions of what the Founding meant, but they agreed that it was central to both the American story & the continuing meaning of the Constitution. The surviving Jacksonians mostly remained loyal Union men.
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4. The timeline of memorialization of the Founders, the Union, the Confederacy, the Greatest Generation - all of these were heavily influenced by the natural timeline of war memorialshttps://www.nationalreview.com/2017/10/national-anthem-confederate-flag-besieged-symbols-unserious-time/ …
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5. That's not to deny that there are also surges from time to time in our historical memory of particular periods & figures, driven by contemporary political needs. But the urge to retcon everything in our history into a narrative of crypto-Confederate mythology is nuts.
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6. As I noted in my Party of Lincoln piece, pro-Founderism has been part of the GOP's DNA from the outset, runs as a consistent through-line connecting Lincoln, Coolidge, Reagan, even Trump.https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/02/22/party-of-lincoln/ …
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7. There are periods (eg, the 1920s) when both pro-Founding & pro-Confederate sentiment ran hot, but often not with the same people or for the same reasons. Harding & Coolidge were not exactly great mythologizers of the Confederacy.
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