I was watching Schoolhouse Rock DVD with my kids and saw the cartoon about the American Revolution: No More Kings.
Why did the US decide to go this way after the Revolution? Most of them were raised in a monarchy, and the European countries were all monarchies. Why did the US decide to do this democracy thing instead? Obviously, the cartoon and elementary school history made it sound like we wanted to “try something new” where everyone was basically equal* and could vote on their leaders. We have our freedom and liberty now; forget Dukes, Earls, and inherited titles, let the people choose.
Did they have a precedent “Let’s try that Ancient Greek thing called Democracy”? Or was it as simple as “We don’t want to do what old England/Europe does”?
*Basically equal. For this question, try not to hijack it with slavery.
“Taxation without representation is tyranny.”
“That government is best which governs least.”
“Whoa, motherf*cker, you want take my what for why?”
Ok - I made the last one up. Why should the US be content to stick with a glorified despotism? The current system in place isn’t a “democracy”; it’s a constitutional republic, but in my mind is a step above an artificial hat-wearing contest. What, exactly, is your complaint?
Hey! I took a class in American Government once. I even remember some vestigial bits of whatever I learned. We discussed things like this.
The design ideas that went into the U. S. government didn’t arise in an intellectual vacuum. There were many thinkers, philosophers, and political scientists in Europe in those who were writing essays about how they felt an “ideal” government “ought” to work. The American Founding Fathers were well aware of them, and drew a lot of their ideas there.
There were writers like Voltaire, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Adam Smith, et many al. Among their various political organization suggestions were the ideas of a multi-cameral government (separation of powers), and checks-and-balances, not to mention many of the civil rights and freedoms that we built into the Constitution.
The Founding Fathers deliberately set out to put some of those ideas into practice.
Our current system is both a democracy and a constitutional republic. Just like the UK is a democracy and a constitutional monarchy. I know it’s a standard conservative trope to declare that “democracy” can only mean direct unlimited democracy where any measure that can get the vote of 51% of the polity must be enacted, but that’s glory for you.
If the subject really intrigues you, I recommend reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. It’s a pretty dense read, but if you truly want to understand the answer to your question you probably won’t do much better.
To summarize (probably poorly) some of his thoughts, gradually improving social and economic conditions had blurred class lines to the point at which the very ideas of monarchy and and aristocracy could finally be seriously challenged. And that was kind of the whole idea behind U.S. independence. Not so much “trying something new,” but more of a growing realization that the old way wasn’t working so great anymore.
If the U.S. had become a monarchy, one big issue would have been, who to have as monarch. George Washington would have been an obvious, and reasonably popular choice, as the first monarch, but he had no children – just one living step-son – so when he died you would need a process for deciding on an heir.
As it is, they gave the President most of the powers of the late 18th-century British monarch, since the Westminster system of constitutional parliamentary monarchy had not evolved at that time, so in some ways the U.S. is an elective limited-term monarchy that just calls itself a “republic”. (Other examples of an elective monarchy are the Holy See – though that does not have limited terms, and is not a democracy – and Malaysia, which does have limited terms and is closer to democracy than to dictatorship.)
It sprouted from the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and thinkers such as Rousseau, Voltaire, Locke, and Montesquieu, who were embraced in America by leaders and thinkers such Jefferson, Madison, and Paine.
Are you perhaps forgetting about the Swiss Confederacy, the Dutch Republic, the Republic of Venice, etc.? Monarchies may have been the norm in Europe at the time, but there was certainly no shortage of republics, many of which were quite powerful and had been for centuries.
Note that, in 1776, the American Colonies declared themselves independent of Great Britain, but they didn’t exactly declare themselves a single, unified nation. They were independent states, affiliated more loosely at first than they would be under the 1789 Constitution.
I don’t know what would have happened if one of the states had tried a monarchical-ish form of government for itself during that time, or whether that would have even been possible.
You have to remember that unlike Europe, the Colonies had no royalty or aristocracy - it was just the commoners who immigrated to America. Sure, there were rich people and there were powerful families, but they didn’t walk around with titles and more importantly, there was no assumption that certain people had the right to rule solely based on their blood. On a personal level, the concept was completely alien to the colonials.
And, indeed, what personal experience Ameican colonists had with a monarchy or aristocracy was mostly bad. It wasn’t the loyal, servile serf who were transported to the American colonies, rather the uppity troublemaking ones. And the King’s governors sent over to America were generally not good quality ruler, and caused a lot of resentment among the population.
Generally, the interactions colonists had with monarchy or aristocracy were not pleasant. So "no more kings’ would have seemed like a good idea to them.
As a practical matter, the former colonists didn’t need any kings because they had basically been governing themselves for a long time. After choosing to fight on when they had to either declare independence or surrender what they needed were not radical new governing systems but rather philosophical underpinning for the ones they already had. (The new state governments were very similar to the old colonial ones and exactly the same in Connecticut and Rhode Island.) Had the Enlightenment theories of Republicanism and inalienable rights and whatnot not existed something else would have had to have been found.
A king is just a person. The institution of a monarchy requires a lot of symbolism. George III, for all his faults, had seven hundred years of tradition to back him up. Napoleon, on the other hand, would soon experience the difficulty of trying a create a tradition.
Suppose they had made George Washington the King of America. Or suppose they had picked some obscure German aristocrat for the job (which was considered). Would this person have commanded the loyalty and respect needed to hold a country together? Washington might have in his lifetime but even if he had children, would his successors have been seen as monarchs? Most Americans would have been saying “Why should we listen to this guy? He’s nothing special.”
An appointed king doesn’t work. People won’t respect the institution that they created themselves. In order for it to work, a royal dynasty has to seize power and own the country for a century or so. Then once it’s established that the dynasty rules, it’s possible to slowly transfer away the power while maintaining the respect.
This was probably part of it. One of the things the colonists wanted was freedom of worship. The King was the head of the Church of England. Take away the king and you take away Established Religion.
Right. At the time it was not yet a foregone conclusion that monarchs would become powerless symbolic figureheads so they would have been wary of selecting someone to personally embody sovereignty for life. Since as mentioned republics, even federal republics, were not an unknown thing, that was an alternative on the table all along, specially in a society that was absent an established native aristocracy (rich rural planters and rich urban bourgeois may be plutocrats or oligarchs, but they are not nobility). An alternative that was extremely attractive to the Founders because it meant technically every one of them could have the chance to try for the top.
Plus, they may have been thinking that if the head of a republic gets too overbearing, there’s less drama about giving him the boot than there is with a king, specially if you had to import a king, who would have relatives in other thrones who may be upset about that.
