¶ … limits to democracy in the early republic, as its first president George Washington reflected the elitist view of the federalists in his approach to the executive branch of government. As Patrick Henry stated in 1788, "The Constitution is said to have beautiful features, but when I come to examine these features…they appear to me horridly frightful…it squints towards monarchy," (p. 146). According to Henry, the "President may easily become King," a fact that should "raise indignation in the breast of every American," (p. 146). Henry was himself not concerned with issues related to race, class, or gender, but he did understand the ideals of the democracy when he lamented, "Whither is the spirit of America gone? Whither is the genius of America fled?" (146). This question can easily be posed to point out the gross hypocrisy in denying Constitutional rights to more than half the population living in the borders of the new nation -- to all of its people of color and to all of its women. At this stage of the Republic term limits for presidents had yet to be set, which is why Patrick Henry was alarmed. Even without framing the potential pitfalls of American government as related to race and gender, Henry did understand there were other pressing issues at stake. Those issues remained unresolved by the Constitution and would remain so even after many of the Amendments to the Constitution were drafted in the Bill of Rights. The most notable exceptions to the extension of rights and liberties to all American citizens were women and non-whites. Washington could not recognize his own hypocrisy when he stated that the United States would "give bigotry no sanction," (p. 147). The United States was formed a few...
The South was producing tobacco and cotton in record output, thanks to a mechanical invention that single-handedly transformed the nature of the cotton industry. That invention was the cotton gin. The cotton gin promoted a rapid harvest, enabling early forms of division of labor even before the Industrial Revolution was in swing. Bailey points out that the cotton gin is directly linked to "the inhumane enslavement of African peoples to work as slaves and the impact of the slave trade and slavery in the South," (35).
Still, many prospered -- visitors such as Alexis de Tocqueville from France marveled at American's drive to acquire wealth, American faith and sociability, as well as the profound racial divisions that characterized American society. American society was poised in continual paradoxes -- religious yet money-hungry, disdainful of social hierarchies yet dependant upon oppressing or disenfranchising races to secure advancement of poorer whites. America was also land-hungry in a way that
15). He argues that there is a duty resting on convention, which he considers in a deep and morally weighty sense, based on an implied but nonetheless binding contract between the individual and the state: It is a fact, then," they would say, "that you are breaking covenants and undertakings made with us, although you mad them under no compulsion of misunderstanding, and were not compelled to decide in a limited
By comparison, Adams "never accepted the necessity of parties, platforms, compromise, and cooperation. Believing that the president should remain above partisan politics he was incapable of manipulating support for his policies or of putting together a congressional majority in support of his initiatives. Above all, John Adams had not accepted the presidency to serve special interest. His role, as he saw it, was not to be guided by the
".. other living species,... also with the total environment in which we live." They explain the human ecosystem to include three fundamental organizing conceptions: the human environed unit (HEU); the natural environment (NE); the human constructed environment (HCE). The following diagram portrays "The Human Ecosystem": Bubolz, Eicher, and Sontag (1979, p. 29) The human environed unit (HEU) displayed in the center is located in a specific space in time and can be a
democratic system for governing a group of people, small or large, must maintain the best interests of all the individuals involved. This general criterion must be upheld regardless of whether specifically what these best interests are cannot be unanimously agreed upon. Ideally, a democracy allows everyone involved an equal voice and vote regarding every decision that concerns that organization. Robert Dahl identifies the five primary components of the ideal
Aside from the practical considerations provided by the system which split the federal and local authorities, there was also the matter of the limitation of powers. In this sense, the central government was built in such a manner as to express the boundaries of the influence even the elected office representatives had on the particular issues concerning each state. Thus, the Congress and the House of Representatives were established and
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