Who cares what the Founders would do? Who believes that the experiences, opinions or plans of men who lived two hundred years ago could have any relevance to our problems? Who imagines that the founders could answer our questions?

We do. I have heard it with my own ears. Over the last decade, I have given hundreds of talks about the founding fathers, on radio and TV, and to live audiences. Every time there is an opportunity for Q&A, there is at least one question of the form, “What would Founder X think about current event, or living person Y?” No subject is too trivial, no problem too difficult. Audiences want to know what the founders would do about guns, taxes, race, the war on drugs, the war in Iraq; about Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush. A recent talk about Alexander Hamilton, first Treasury Secretary, and first (and so far only) former Treasury Secretary to be shot, was typical. The host was a financial services firm on Park Avenue. The crowd was young to middle aged, white collar-white shirtsleeve, on their lunch break. Out of two hundred people, a dozen asked questions. Four wanted Hamilton’s opinion about a contemporary issue: the balance of trade; recent decisions of the Supreme Court on federalism; the New York Stock Exchange; the tone of modern politics (the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004 were fresh in everyone’s mind). The man had been dead for two centuries; the duel he died in is still the most familiar thing about him (that, and his rather GQ-ish portrait on the ten dollar bill). Yet a crowd whose business is to anticipate tomorrow’s business wanted to know what he would think about the stories that were on that day’s Bloomberg.

Americans have been asking what the founders would do since the founders died. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln kicked off his first presidential campaign with a speech at Cooper Union in New York City—a combined equivalent of an Iowa caucus and an appearance on Oprah. Lincoln’s issue was whether the federal government could regulate slavery in the territories—the unsettled interior of the continent, not yet divided into states. The Supreme Court (in the Dred Scott decision) had said no; Lincoln said yes. At Cooper Union he spent half his debut talk examining what the 39 signers of the Constitution thought about federal regulation of territorial slavery. He concluded that 21 of them, including George Washington, agreed with him (perhaps two disagreed; 16 had no provable opinion). He wrapped himself in Washington. We “sustain his policy…you [that is, the supporters of slavery] repudiate it.”

Lincoln won the election; the Civil War began. In 1863, in the Gettysburg Address, he wrapped the Union cause in two founding documents. The first was the Declaration of Independence: the moment (1863 minus four score and seven equals 1776) when Congress stated that “all men are created equal.” The second was the Constitution, “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” which Lincoln hoped would not perish from the earth, echoing “We the People” who had established that government in the first place.

In the 1930s, with the world mired in the Depression, and various fascisms on the march, Franklin Roosevelt turned to Thomas Jefferson as to a touchstone. In 1938 Jefferson went on the nickel, in place of the Indian brave; Monticello went on the reverse, in place of the buffalo. FDR laid the cornerstone of the Jefferson Memorial the following year. The completed structure was dedicated in 1943, in the midst of World War II (the cherry trees on the Tidal Basin which so beautifully frame it in the spring had been a gift of the city of Tokyo in better times).

Twenty years after the Jefferson Memorial was finished, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. He not surprisingly held up Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation as models for future black progress. But he also held up Lincoln’s predecessors, “the architects of our republic,” who, when they “wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence… sign[ed] a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” Many of the architects of the republic, he knew, owned black men; some of them slept with black women they owned. But King laid claim to their words, not as a clever debater stealing rhetorical bases, but as a family member presenting a keepsake. He did not put the founders’ words to his purposes, he found their purposes anticipating his words.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. When Bill Clinton was being impeached, for lying under oath about his affair with an intern, his defenders claimed the founders as his role models, for DNA tests had just revealed that a Jefferson fathered one of the children of Thomas Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemmings, a tale which had been whispered about since Jefferson’s years in the White House; while Alexander Hamilton, during his years as Treasury Secretary, had carried on an affair with Maria Reynolds, wife of a common crook, to whom Hamilton had paid blackmail—a tale on which whispering ceased the moment Hamilton revealed it in a 96-page pamphlet, with the deceptively dull title Observations on Certain Documents. What was a little obstruction of justice next to paying blackmail and fathering a child on one’s property? Clinton’s enemies complained that Hamilton, at least, had told the truth about what he had done.

From the ridiculous to mass murder. After the destruction of the World Trade Center, exhausted firemen, cops and rescue workers snatched scattered hours of rest on the pews of St. Paul’s Chapel, an eighteenth-century Episcopalian church across the street from the hell hole. Among the pews they rested on is the one where George Washington worshipped after his first inauguration as President in 1789. Washington knew New York City well. It was there, in July 1776, that he had the Declaration of Independence read to his troops. And it was there, a few months later, that he tried to beat off a British invasion—the last time, before 9/11, that New York was attacked. Washington had a worse time of it than we did. The enemy chased him from the city, occupied it for seven and a half years, and let 11,000 American soldiers die in filthy prison ships moored in the East River.

In moments of struggle, farce, or disaster, the founders are still with us. We look to them for slogans, cheap shots, inspiration and instruction. We seize on them for sleazy advantage and for moral guidance. We ransack what they said and did for clues to what they would, and what we should, do.

The founders knew they were making history. John Adams believed that the day of independence “will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival….It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Like every other country, we honor our heroes, celebrate our holidays, remember our defeats, and regret our failings. But we do more. We engage the founders in a continuing dialogue about the present. It is an imaginary dialogue, for the founders are dead. Yet they are not entirely dead, for they live on in our minds. Parades and fireworks commemorate American independence, as Adams predicted. But the New York Times also commemorates it by reprinting the Declaration of Independence. We are not content to remember what the founders did; we must read, or at least see, their explanation of it. Having read it, we feel that we can engage it. The Declaration is a position paper and an action memo that is always in our mail box; we believe we can hit the reply button, for further elaboration.

Our feelings about these historical figures seem more religious than historical. Evangelical Christians put the bumper sticker, WWJD, on their cars: What Would Jesus Do? The phrase comes from a religious novel, In His Steps, in which a minister in a middle American city asks his congregation to reform their lives by doing nothin “without first asking the question, ‘What would Jesus do?’” The phrasing is borrowed, tongue-in-cheek, for the divinities of lesser faiths (WWMD—What Would Martha [Stewart] Do?). Yet the founders are not gods. “Had he lived in the days of idolatry,” wrote Frances Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration, of George Washington, “he had been worshipped as a god.” High praise. But Hopkinson, Washington, and the other founders believed they lived after the days of idolatry. When Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day, July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, Adams’s oldest son, John Quincy Adams, saw the coincidence as a “visible and palpable mark…of Divine favor, for which I would humble myself in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe”. God blessed the founders, they did not bless themselves. Their specialness comes from being human creators of a human thing, America. We, their successor Americans, feel simultaneously awed by them and like them. They built the country, they wrote the user’s manuals—Declaration, Constitution, Federalist Papers—and they ran it while it could still be returned to the manufacturer. We assume that if anyone knows how the U.S.A. should work, it must be them. In that spirit, we ask WWFD—What Would the Founders Do?