Conservatives complain that academia has a liberal bias. (Stephen Colbert joked that reality has a liberal bias, too.) That's why Earl Taylor, a charter school principal and president of National Center for Constitutional Studies, has been leading a "Making of America" seminar that teaches that "the Founding Fathers have answers to nearly every problem we have in America today." From the Washington Post article "
Conservative class on Founding Fathers' answers to current woes gains popularity":
If a "tea party" event is where the disaffected go to protest the present, his classes are where they go to ponder the past. Participants include members of "9.12" groups inspired by conservative commentator Glenn Beck, Republicans, home-school groups and people affiliated with militias.
Taylor walked them through a 131-page, fill-in-the-blank workbook that frames the nation's founding in a religious context and portrays the size and scope of the modern federal government as a form of tyranny.
His course became popular in part because of an emotional endorsement last year from Beck, who has praised the late W. Cleon Skousen, who wrote the course's curriculum. He was a far-right anti-Communist Mormon fundamentalist and professor of religious studies at Brigham Young University whose historical work has been criticized by academics as ill-conceived and inaccurate. (The group Institute on the Constitution in Pasadena, Md., offers similar courses on a smaller scale.)
Taylor spun stories of Benjamin Franklin as a praying man who wept after signing the Constitution, and Thomas Jefferson as a conflicted soul who wished to abolish slavery but because of his benevolence was reluctant to free his own slaves. "If you've been to Monticello and you see how Jefferson cared for them, they didn't want to leave," Taylor told the class.
He avoided what he called "negative stuff" about the Founders' "supposed immorality." (In recent years, for instance, books about Jefferson have focused on research asserting that he fathered children of Sally Hemings, a slave owned by the nation's third president.)
Taylor continued article by article through the Constitution and addressed each amendment, though he paused to say the nation's leaders could have stopped at the 10th Amendment. He opposes the federal income tax (16th Amendment) and thinks that women's suffrage (19th Amendment) could have been enacted individually by the states. In his view, the Founders would not have authorized programs such as federal aid to farmers, national parks, welfare programs and regulatory agencies.
Michael Kimmage, a history professor at Catholic University, said the popularity of Taylor's course has continuity with the anti-Communist movement in the 1950s.
"There is an us-versus-them quality to it," he said. "It is a search for political purity that is deeply associated with the Constitution and has a timeless quality. They are saying that these are truths about politics that never change, and it's our obligation to return to these timeless truths."
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