| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy. By Bruce Ackerman. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2005. 384 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01866-4.)
Professor Bruce Ackerman chides the Constitution's framers as blunderers who failed to think matters through in devising their unwieldy scheme for electing the president. He accordingly assigns major blame to the Founders for bringing the nation to the brink of disaster in 1800, a moment when American history might "have moved in a Latin American direction" (pp. 3–4). Despite the Founders' "technical mess" (p. 93), the republic—thanks in no small part to "dumb luck" (pp. 105, 108)—fitfully made the transition to popular sovereignty and "presidential democracy."	1
Ackerman's engaging, sometimes breezy style belies the deeply moral purpose of his provocative account of the election of 1800 and the ensuing confrontation between the Republican political majority and the Federalist judiciary. For in telling the story of the "last phase of the Founding" (p. 12), Ackerman writes not as a historian but as an advocate intent on persuading his fellow Americans to forswear their complacent faith in the written Constitution as "'a machine that would go of itself'" (p. 266). That normative enterprise drives his narrative and interpretation. Characterizing his work as a "drama in five acts" (p. 7), the author adopts the playwright's techniques of exaggeration and contrast; he colors and shades characters and events for maximum dramatic effect. In his hands the electoral deadlock of 1800 is a dire crisis, the contest between Federalists and Republicans is a fierce ideological struggle, and his protagonists, Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, are implacable enemies.	. . .

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