11-5-15
Ben Carson States, Wrongly, That Founding Fathers ‘Had No Elected Office Experience’
Breaking Newstags: election 2016, Ben Carson
Ben Carson tried to compare his own lack of political experience to that of the Founding Fathers. The trouble is, he got his history wrong.
In a Facebook post late Wednesday, Mr. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon seeking the GOP presidential nomination, asked if the American people really want officials with political experience. He added, “Every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience.”
“That’s just patently false,” said Benjamin L. Carp, an associate professor of history at Brooklyn College and author of books on the American Revolution.
Mr. Carp said Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, John Hancock and many other signers had been elected members of their colonial assemblies, prior to signing the Declaration. Mr. Carp said he hadn’t done a tally, but believes that a majority of the signers had held elected office.
That was echoed by Gordon S. Wood, an emeritus professor of history at Brown University and a leading scholar of the American Revolution, who said Mr. Carson’s claim was “wrong.” He said most of the signers had not been governors, since those were appointed by the British Crown, but pointed out that Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island had been an elected governor....
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel