Critical Skills

What would the Founding Fathers think about the United States Senate? In Federalist #63, Madison called the Senate a “temperate and respectable body” designed to check the people’s “temporary errors and delusions.” The Federal Farmer warned it would become aristocratic — too small, too stable, too easily captured by wealth and faction. In this episode of “If They Only Knew…,” they debate whether stability becomes paralysis, whether deliberation becomes obstruction, and whether a body designed to guard national character might itself need guarding. Madison speculated about direct election; the Federal Farmer imagined senators serving for decades. Both saw dangers the other missed. The Senate endures. Whether it serves the founders’ vision — or has become what they feared — is for us to decide.

What would the Founding Fathers think about career politicians? In Federalist #35, Alexander Hamilton dismissed the idea that Congress needed members of every class, trusting instead that electoral dependence would create “strong chords of sympathy” between representatives and the people. But what if legislators became a permanent class unto themselves—knowing no trade but governing, no society but the capital? Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison imagine a future where the governing class becomes its own faction, and the sympathy Hamilton promised grows dangerously thin. Their speculation will feel uncomfortably familiar.

What would the Founding Fathers think about gerrymandering? In Federalist #6, Hamilton warned of ‘dissensions between the states’–but what if states turned that weapon inward, drawing district boundaries to swallow their opponents’ votes? In this exchange, Hamilton speculates about cartography as a political weapon while Madison sees the structural flaw: the fox guards the henhouse. Neither foresees the remedy. The serpent hatched in 1812, when Madison’s own Vice President signed a salamander-shaped district into law–and gave the practice its name.

What would the Founding Fathers think about how we educate our children? In their remarkable correspondence between 1812 and 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams remembered their own educations—Jefferson dining with his mentors at the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, Adams teaching “little runtlings” in a one-room schoolhouse in Worcester—and speculated about how a republic of millions might preserve what they had learned. Jefferson imagined classrooms where students and teachers sat as equals around a common table, where none could hide and all must defend their ideas. Adams asked the harder question: Where shall you find such teachers, and how shall you prevent the lazy from driving out the industrious? Their letters reveal what we are only now rediscovering: that education is not a system—it is a commitment, and it requires people willing to do the work.