IF SUPERMAN CAN return to help us, why can't America's founders? It's true, Superman is alive and the founders are not. On the other hand, Superman is fictional, whereas Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton and the rest were flesh-and-blood politicians, dealing with problems surprisingly similar to our own and establishing the laws and institutions we still use to confront those problems.
Illegal immigration, for example, is a red-hot issue today, but the first immigration debates go back more than 200 years. In 1798, Congress passed and President John Adams signed the Alien Act, a law allowing the president to deport dangerous aliens on his own say-so, without trial. The stimulus was an influx of refugees from Ireland and France -- countries undergoing political turmoil that many founders feared would be brought to the U.S. by the new immigrants. Rep. Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts, for example, warned in Congress of "hordes of wild Irishmen" coming here "to disturb our tranquillity."
Thomas Jefferson, who intended to replace Adams as president, opposed the Alien Act on the grounds that it gave the executive too much power. But Jefferson's position also appealed to ethnic and immigrant voters in America, including, in addition to wild Irishmen, the German Americans in Pennsylvania and New York City. Jefferson's success with these voters was one reason he won the election of 1800.
In other words, key elements of our debate were already in place: fear that immigration would be a political and cultural problem versus confidence that it was no problem at all, especially if immigrants voted the right way. The founders were split on the question, as politicians are today.
The founders were unfamiliar with ICBMs and atom bombs and the threats they posed. But at least one of them contemplated preemptive war. In 1803, President Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million. His old enemy, Alexander Hamilton, congratulated him on the acquisition but added that Jefferson should have simply taken it. "Sound policy unquestionably demanded of us ... to seize the object at once" -- then we could have dickered over the price.
Hamilton was so bellicose because France was ruled by Napoleon, a known aggressor; indeed, the French had already made trouble for Americans trying to ship produce down the Mississippi and out of New Orleans. In Hamilton's view, there were hostile actions short of war that justified hostile responses. An Army veteran who came from a broken home, he expected the world to be dangerous.
