Professionalism

 

Our Creative Founders

 

"The Founders of the American Nation were one of the most creative groups in modern history. Some among them, especially in recent years, have been condemned for their failures and weaknesses - for their racism, sexism, compromises, and violations of principle. And indeed moral judgments are as necessary in assessing the lives of these people as of any others. But we are privileged to know and to benefit from the outcome of their efforts, which they could only hopefully imagine, and ignore their main concern: which was the possibility, indeed the probability, that their creative enterprise - not to recast the social order but to transform the political system - would fail; would collapse into chaos or autocracy. Again and again they were warned of the folly of defying the received traditions, the sheer unlikelihood that they, obscure people on the outer borderlands of European civilization, knew better than the established authorities that ruled them; that they could successfully create something freer; ultimately more enduring than what was then known in the centers of metropolitan life."