A fresh look at the framers.

Founding Fathers. They lived more than two centuries ago. They were an elite class even in their day. They were certainly imperfect by today's political standards. Still, the Founding Fathers led a revolution against the most powerful nation on Earth and created a constitution that guides the longest lasting national government in the world today.

So it is no surprise that people on all sides of just about any issue go back to those late 18th-century creators of the United States to seek their support in the midst of controversy.

"The general public wants to rip these men out of their 18th-century context and use them in some way in today's world," observed Gordon S. Wood, a Brown University history professor in his presentation to the NCEW convention.

"Whenever people tell you what the Founders really meant, it's generally because they want the Founders to agree with them," cautioned Pauline Maier, an American history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Wood, Maier, and John Ferling, a history professor at the University of West Georgia, tried to help editorial writers and columnists make some sense of the Founding Fathers during their convention presentation.

Each had a bit of a different take on what made the Founders special, the real "greatest generation," as Wood described them.

For Wood, it was that most of the leaders in that period were defined by "achieved values rather than inherited status." They came out of an era of aristocracy. Yet in waging the American Revolution, they had to justify what they were doing in terms of character and values. Those ideals live on in an America that still puts a premium on accomplishment over inheritance.

Maier emphasized how ordinary these leaders were yet how effectively they rose to the demands of the times in which they lived. "If we hold them and all that they did in awe, we freeze it in time" she warned. She cited some of the words of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams early in the 19th century calling on a new generation to adapt the government based on their experiences.

Ferling saw the social system around the Founders as contributing to their greatness. For the most part, they had a classical education. They were chosen as the best representatives of wide regions rather than from specific districts. They did not have their personal lives judged by the public, and they shared an ethic of sacrificing for the common good.

They also realized, he said, "that this was their one shot at opening opportunities for themselves that they would never obtain in the British empire."

So what of those who would claim a piece of the Founders' vision as their own? What, asked NCEW member Charles Reinken of Omaha, of contemporary letter writers who begin with the premise that "we were founded as a Christian nation ...?"

Wood noted that the population of the 13 colonies was, by and large, Christian at the time of the American Revolution. But most of the Founders were "anti-clerical and not emotionally religious," he said. The Founders had a general sense that the government should remain religiously neutral.

"One of the greatest gifts of the Revolution was it at least began to get the state out of the religion business," Maier argued. "If you believe in religion, don't fool with the system. Religion in America has thrived without the sponsorship of the state."

Phil Haslanger, a past NCEW president, is managing editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. E-mail [e-mail]