The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers

McClanahan makes discovering the Founders a joy. I found his comments sound and his recommended reading a must. I would put him in a category with Kevin Gutzman and Tom Woods-and that is great company. This is the stuff you need to learn from people.

This is a perfect resource for those seeking materials designed to educate, round out and fill in those questions about our most sacred beginnings. I've been researching this very topic for many months and McClanahan's book helped tremendously, as did the following other sources: Spaeth & Smith's Constitution of the United States, Dick Morris's 'Catastrophe', Levin's 'Liberty and Tyranny', 'Politically incorrect guide to the Constitution' and several others but hands down, Brion's book is the BEST, it's laid out the cleanest, makes the most sense, has interest stories, terrific analogies, keeps you reading, makes kids WANT to learn...it's a book that belongs in EVERY American's den.. Dr. McClanahan should be breaking down every difficult subject for Americans into 'politically incorrect' guides, he's great at it!!! this is my two cents!! Annie Hamilton

Dr. McClanahan has written a very informative, very readable, and interesting book about the founders of the U.S. Constitution. First he refutes some myths about the founding fathers. Then he demonstrates the basic conservatism of the founders. He shows that, unlike the leaders of the French Revolution, the founders looked to human experience, in particular European and English experience in government as their guide in establishing the constitution. He demonstrates that on most present day issues the founders would be considered conservative. Dr. McClanahan then presents some very interesting and well researched biographies of leading founding fathers and prominent leaders of the period. His biographies include not only the major founding fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson but also some often neglected statesmen as Charles Carroll, George Mason, and Nathaniel Macon. This Marylander was particularly interested in Charles Carroll who not only signed the Declaration of Independence but helped instigate the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad which greatly boosted American technology and living standards. Throughout his work Dr. McClanahan develops an interesting point. The point is that centralized organs of power starting with limited powers have a tendency to augment and amplify their sphere of power and control. The founders would not have granted anywhere near the powers held by the federal government today. Dr. McClanahan has his biases. But he has written a very useful, basically objective, and very well referenced book. He presents an extensive bibliography for further reading. The book is a very worthwhile read.

This is a truly wonderful book. It answers some of the many questions I had about what my three children were learning about American History during their six years studying in Boston Latin School. Living in the heart of historic Boston, I was constantly being stunned and amazed that my children didn't know who the various statues in their neighborhood honored. They had grown up riding their Big Wheels and bicycles around some of these bronze statues of famous Americans without having the faintest idea of each statue's identity. All three could tell me who Harriet Tubman was, but none could tell me exactly why Paul Revere, Sam Adams and John Hancock were famous. They did recognize two of the names--one was a well-known beer and the other was the name of Back Bay Boston's tallest building. For all those fans of the Jay Leno television Walking Tours who were constantly shocked of the level of ignorance in the general public as demonstrated by his perfectly normal appearing tourists that Jay asked simple questions to at "Universal City," this book answers many of the questions that none of Jay's clueless average American tourists could answer even after he gave them clues. You know, "Who's buried in Grant's Tomb" or "Who is Washington D.C. named after?" This book is a long overdue correction of the media and educational record. The honor of the title of the "Greatest Generation" belongs to "the Founders, the men who pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for the cause of liberty and independence...The Founding generation has no equal, and it deserves to be rescued from politically correct textbooks, teachers, and professors who want to dismiss the Founder as cadre of dead, white, sexist, slave-holding males." "De-emphasizing, or disparaging, men like Washington, Jefferson, and Henry serves a purpose. It is meant to sever our attachment to, and our respect for, the Founders and their principles and to replace them with the Left's own ideal of a living' Constitution that better reflects our increasing diverse nation and the interests..." "The irony is that the Founders had a better understanding of the problems we face today than do our own members of Congress." This book will help explain why all of this is true and why the myths and falsehoods about the Founding Fathers have purposely been perpetrated by the educational system and the liberal media. This volume tries to correct these myths such as the Founders "created a democracy." They created a republic and greatly feared a pure democracy. In addition to correcting the widely held myths, the first part of the book also explains "A Conservative Revolution" that is what "The Declaration of Independence," "The U.S. Constitution" together with its "Bill of Rights" really was. The third section of the book's First Part spells out the issues facing us today, but that were foreseen by the Founders and how they devised a way to handle them centuries into the future. Part II gives gre

Brion McClanahan has written a gem of a book with The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers. Here we get a sense of what the founding generation was really like and what they really believed and did, not the sensational, trivial and silly portrayals that we so often get from non-academic sources such as the History Channel and PBS. As for the academics who write on the Founders, far too many come to their subject with veiled (and some not so thinly veiled) agendas that it is difficult to know who exactly these men were. The great virtue of McClanahan's guide is that it is rooted in that which all good and true history is grounded, the primary sources. As McClanahan himself asserts, if you want to know what the Founders really thought, then simply read what they wrote. When you do, as McClanahan has done, you truly do find a generation of brilliant men who believed in liberty and were willing to fight to secure it. The book is divided into two parts with the first touching on several contemporary myths about the Founders. Here you will find excellent dismissals of the myths surrounding the Founding generation's supposed egalitarianism and support for democracy. McClanahan demonstrates what any honest and knowledgeable historian of the period knows; the Founders did not believe in equality as it is presently conceived and they certainly were not unreserved advocates for democratic government. In doing this McClanahan reminds us that the Founders created a Federal Republic, not a mass, egalitarian democracy, and an appreciation of the differences between these forms of government is an essential starting point to understanding the history of the early American Republic. Other myths exposed include Benjamin Franklin's legendary brood of illegitimate children, Alexander Hamilton's homosexuality and George Washington's alleged affair with Sally Fairfax, his neighbor's wife. And, of course, what expose' of founding myths would be complete without a discussion of Thomas Jefferson's supposed affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, the evidence for which is circumstantial and inconclusive although it is often asserted as fact these days. McClanahan also does an excellent job of demonstrating just how conservative the American Revolution actually was in that American Patriots were not asserting radical new doctrines inspired by Enlightenment philosophers but principles grounded in the traditions of English liberty and American colonial experience. This was the key feature of the American Revolution and why it differed so remarkably from that of the French. Also on offer are brief but thought-provoking discussions of several important contemporary issues like gun control, the role of religion in American life, federalism, and monetary policy, all in relation to what the Founders would have thought about these issues if they were alive today. As good as the first part of the book is, however, the best is prob