The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity's Ancient Way of Living

By Thom Hartmann

America's most popular progressive radio host and New York Times bestselling author Thom Hartmann paves the way to saving our democracy.

In this powerful, sweeping history and analysis of American democracy, Thom Hartmann shows how democracy is the one form of governance most likely to produce peace and happiness among people.

With the violent exception of the Civil War, American democracy resisted the pressure to disintegrate into factionalism for nearly two centuries, and now our very system of democratic elections is at stake. So how do we save our democracy?

Hartmann's newest book in the celebrated Hidden History Series offers a clear call to action and a set of solutions with road maps for individuals and communities to follow to create a safer, more just society and a more equitable and prosperous economy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781523004409

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann is the host of the nationally and internationally syndicated talkshow The Thom Hartmann Program and the TV show The Big Picture on the Free Speech TV network. He is the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of 24 books, including Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception, ADHD and the Edison Gene, and The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, which inspired Leonardo DiCaprio’s film The 11th Hour. A former psychotherapist and founder of the Hunter School, a residential and day school for children with ADHD, he lives in Washington, D.C.

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Cover: The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living

The Hidden History of American Democracy

THE

HIDDEN HISTORY of

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

REDISCOVERING HUMANITY’S ANCIENT WAY OF LIVING

THOM HARTMANN

The Hidden History of American Democracy

Copyright © 2023 by Thom Hartmann

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First Edition

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Hartmann, Thom, 1951– author.

Title: The hidden history of American democracy : rediscovering humanity’s ancient way of living / Thom Hartmann.

Description: Oakland, CA : Berrett -Koehler Publishers, [2023] | Series: The Thom Hartmann hidden history series ; 9 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022061964 (print) | LCCN 2022061965 (ebook) | ISBN 9781523004386 (paperback) | ISBN 9781523004393 (pdf) | ISBN 9781523004409 (epub) | ISBN 9781523004416 (audio)

Subjects: LCSH: United States—Politics and government. | Democracy—United States—History. | Constitutional history—United States.

Classification: LCC JK31 .H3747 2023 (print) | LCC JK31 (ebook) | DDC 320.973—dc23/eng/20230216

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061964

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061965

2022-1

LC Book production: Linda Jupiter Productions | Interior design: Good Morning Graphics | Proofread: Daniel Gall | Cover design: Wes Youssi, M.80 Design | Edit: Elissa Rabellino | Index: Lieser Indexing

To Dr. Richard Silberstein (Australia) and Rabbi Hillel Zeitlin (Israel), two dear, longtime friends and democracy advocates who helped keep me sane through the pandemic.

As mankind becomes more liberal they will be more apt to allow, that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the Community are equally entitled to the protection of civil Government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality.

—George Washington, from To Roman Catholics in America, March 1790

To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe.

—Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, 1797

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: DEMOCRACY IS IN OUR GENES

PART ONE: THE FOUNDERS MEET ANCIENT DEMOCRACY

Some Founders Thought Their Enlightenment Came from Rousseau

Ancient Ways

Trial and Error

They Were Citing Native Americans?

Ben Franklin’s Enlightenment

Native Americans Changed the World!

The Secular Origin of America

A Nation Is Birthed

PART TWO: AMERICA GETS A CONSTITUTION—BUT DON’T ASK THE AVERAGE AMERICAN WHAT’S IN IT

The Electoral College

The Supreme Court

The Founders Wanted Us to Have Lots of Guns to Shoot at Tyrannical Politicians?

Three Equal Branches of Government

The Senate Was Intended as a Democratic Institution

Did Rich White Guys Create the United States Just to Guarantee Their Own Privilege, Power, and Slaves?

How Rich Is Rich?

The Rich White Guys Hypothesis Crumbles

So What Did Motivate the Framers of the Constitution?

PART THREE: THE BATTLE FOR DEMOCRACY

How Political and Economic Systems Interact

Democracy’s Modern Crisis

The Modern War on Democracy and Regulated Capitalism

PART FOUR: A 21ST-CENTURY DEMOCRACY AGENDA

Make Voting a Right Instead of a Privilege

Regulate the Supreme Court

Expand the Senate

Offer Free High-Quality Public Education to All—through College

Provide Health Care for All

Support Organized Labor or Organize Your Workplace

Use Tariffs and Trade Policy to Balance Labor’s Playing Field

Bring Back the Middle Class by Restoring the Tax Laws That Created It

Keep Social Security Out of Corporate Hands

Guarantee Americans a Clean Environment and Healthy Public Lands

Strengthen the Sherman Antitrust Act and Break Up Monopolies

Bust Up the Media Conglomerates and Restore a Robust Free Press

Make the Revolving Door between Industry and Regulatory Agencies Illegal

Use Tax Incentives and Grants to Jump-Start Alternative Energy

Keep Human Rights for Humans, Not for Aggregated Capital

Keep Church and State Separate

Make the United States More Democratic in Its Elections: Set Limits on Campaign Spending, Consider Public Funding

Institute Instant-Runoff Voting to Make Minority Parties Viable

Abolish the Electoral College

Get Involved!

CONCLUSION: REVITALIZING DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA WON’T BE EASY BUT IS DEFINITELY WORTH THE EFFORT

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

Democracy Is in Our Genes

The grand experiment of American democracy didn’t come out of thin air, and it was only marginally based on the experience of the Greek democracies and the Roman republic, contrary to what most people believe.

The one great universal impulse that animates humans working toward self-governance the world over is freedom: an escape from bonds laid on one people by another, by the powerful over the powerless, by the rich over the poor.

As Europeans began driving deep into the American landscape throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries, stories began to trickle back to Europe about people who had figured out how to live in civilized society without the chains of oppression—both political and religious—that were the hallmarks of that era.

Some came from French missionaries to the Indians, others from trappers and traders, and still others from people like Thomas Jefferson’s father, Peter, who made maps and traveled in what became the Commonwealth of Virginia for his work.

Stories spread of these extraordinary people—these Indians—who governed themselves without prisons, chains, or even police. Native Americans who’d become fluent in English or French traveled to Europe and challenged inequality, theocracy, and royalty to its face.

The intelligentsia of France, in particular, was consumed with the idea that egalitarian self-governance might not just be possible but might even be the natural or original state of humankind. These viral ideas swept Europe every bit as completely as had Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, which he nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.

As the philosophers of the European Enlightenment were struck by these novel ideas contradicting their biblical and historical notions of the evil nature of humankind, the notions of equality and fraternity flowed back across the Atlantic to inflame the minds of 18th-century American colonists.

While there’s not a one-to-one correlation between the governing principles of, for example, the Iroquois Confederacy and the US Constitution, the core principles animating both were nearly identical: equality of citizenship. Government is legitimate only with the consent of the governed. Men who claim power through hereditary lineage or a direct line to the gods must be limited in the power they can acquire or possess. Greed and unbridled power are evils. Society’s highest obligation is to care for all its people, not merely to serve those with the highest status or wealth.

Our Founding Generation integrated these concepts into a coherent governing philosophy and then, after independence, crafted them into a clumsy attempt at constitutional self-governance.

It was a bold and dangerous experiment, defying, as it did, a thousand years of European history and the greatest powers of the world at the time.

Democracy within tribal communities has a long history that’s not limited to modern nations or the New World. Jefferson was obsessed with the democracy practiced by his tribal ancestors living in the British Isles before they were conquered by the Romans 1,700 years earlier.

Virtually every ethnography of tribal people living the way humans did for hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture and the rise of modern warlord kingdoms describes them as egalitarian, be they the ancient San of southern Africa, the seafaring people who populated the South Pacific, or the tribes of Central America before they were conquered by the Aztec and Mayan empires.

Democracy, it turns out, is the default state of virtually every animal species on Earth, and humanity is no exception.¹ Only with the power of great wealth, control of media, or the force of arms and technology is it overcome by dictators, popes, and kings.

PART ONE

The Founders Meet Ancient Democracy

There was a full moon that night in a cloudless sky.

Thomas Jefferson watched respectfully as the elders and the head women, as he’d come to call them, gathered to sit on blankets in a place of great honor near where the famous Cherokee warrior Ontasseté was about to speak. Although Jefferson was only 19, at six foot two he was conspicuously tall among the Indians and was treated as an adult, the same as his companion, the 28-year-old Thomas Sumter.

Although his shyness prevented him from speaking of it publicly, Jefferson knew he’d earned the right to be considered an adult the year of his 14th birthday, when his life was shattered by his father’s death and he inherited full and legal responsibility for his mother, two brothers, six sisters, and 60 enslaved people, along with the family’s farm.

He watched as the sparks from the fire flew toward the moonlit sky, listening to the strange language of the Cherokee and the Creek around him. He understood a few of their words, and later in life he would study their languages with the same sharp mind that enabled him to learn to read and write Greek, Latin, and French before he was a teenager.

Sumter, his companion, was a strong and aggressive man; the contrast between the two—the bold fighter and the lanky red-haired, freckle-faced scholar—was distinct. Jefferson was in his last year of studies at the College of William and Mary, about to study law in a few months, while Sumter, who had left home as a teenager to fight in the French and Indian Wars, would leave the next day to escort Ontasseté to meet the king of England.

Neither knew it that night, but Sumter would one day be a general in the war for independence, and Jefferson would write the document that formally declared it. Sumter’s older sister, Patience, was a well-known midwife in Jefferson’s community and may well have helped Jefferson’s mother give birth to some of his younger siblings, as Jefferson recommended her services to others.

The sounds of the Cherokee language and the sight of the people assembling brought back for Jefferson childhood memories of the many times Ontasseté had visited while traveling from his Cherokee village to Williamsburg, Virginia. Ontasseté liked to spend the night at the Shadwell, Virginia, farm of Peter Jefferson, and often Peter had invited his young son Thomas to join him and Ontasseté in conversations that stretched long into the evening.

Peter Jefferson knew many of the Native people of the region; he was the sort of man who made friends instantly, and he had a fascination with Native peoples and culture. He’d come to know hundreds of their leaders as he mapped the Virginia colony 11 years earlier in 1751. Thomas was nine the year Peter mapped Virginia; Peter died five years later.

So much in answer to your inquiries concerning Indians, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in June 1812, a people with whom, in the early part of my life, I was very familiar, and acquired impressions of attachment and commiseration for them which have never been obliterated. Before the Revolution, they were in the habit of coming often and in great numbers to the seat of government, where I was very much with them. I knew much the great Ontasseté, the warrior and orator of the Cherokees; he was always the guest of my father, on his journeys to and from Williamsburg.¹

On June 19, 1754, when Jefferson was only nine years old, Benjamin Franklin had introduced the Albany