The Founding of the USA. Analysis of Terry Bouton's book "Taming Democracy".
Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy
The founding fathers of the Revolution did not have the best intentions of forging a great system of Democracy in the United States of America.
Majority of the book is set in Pennsylvania and meticulously details a lot of the struggles and challenges the founding fathers as well as the common man faced in that era. Faced with issues such as popular governments, public administration and financial investments, the author paints vivid pictures of the efforts of the founding fathers to stifle democracy as we know it today. Traditionally, students of government and history have been made to believe that the greatest contributors to the powerful society we have today as it concerns politics and interpersonal human interactions were the founding fathers. This book tends to prove otherwise. The reader is taken on a journey to see how despite their lofty ideas, the ‘Revolutionalists’ tended to be elitists who believed in stifling certain classes of the society in order to maintain their stranglehold on them. They passed certain political and fiscal laws to ensure that they remained relevant in the scheme of things. The rich were supposed to stay rich while the ‘have-nots’ were not given much of an opportunity to climb up the social ladder. It also chronicles the importance of the peasants such as farmers and how they shaped the society at the time. Civil disturbances were seen as rebellious and ephemeral, and as such were not given much of a look-in until they metamorphosed into civil disobedience. The book reveals a unique perception, depicting very clearly how the war and the events that ensued affected the working class in America. The author also introduced us to the real heroes during the same timeframe-farmers, carpenters, and tailors who put their lives on hold to fight to instill democracy and popular rule against the wishes of the bourgeois. It also portrays real characters from the Revolution such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, as genuinely imperfect people, only interested in what they were personally entitled to.