Founding amateurs? Fed up with "professional politicians" many Americans say they want to go back to "citizen legislators" like the Founding Fathers. But it turns out the Founders were a pretty experienced bunch.

• Author: Wood, Gordon S.
• Position: OPINION - Essay

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It's an American tradition. We complain that our national leaders are out of touch, and that they've turned into "professional politicians" who no longer understand the needs of the folks back home.

In tough times like these, with unemployment high and a deadly war dragging on in Afghanistan, Americans are in a particularly sour mood. As Election Day approaches, that spells trouble for not only President Obama and his fellow Democrats, who control both houses of Congress, but also for incumbents of either party.

That's one reason the Tea Party--which isn't really a party, but a loose group of conservative Republicans--has attracted a great deal of attention with its anti-incumbent and anti-Washington messages. For some voters, the Tea Party's retro name and the Colonial outfits they sometimes wear recall a time when the nation wasn't being run by professional politicians--or so the argument goes.

Professor Gordon Wood of Brown University doesn't take issue in this essay with any Tea Party positions, but he does question how Tea Party members--and Americans in general--romanticize the Founding Fathers.

The American public is not pleased with Congress. One recent poll shows that less than a third of all voters are eager to support their representative in November's midterm elections. And President Obama's approval rating is hovering below 50 percent.

"I am not really happy fight now with anybody" a woman from Decatur, Illinois, told a Washington Post reporter. As she considered the prospect of a government composed of fledgling lawmakers, she noted: "When the country was founded, those guys were all pretty new at it. How bad could it be?"

Actually, our Founders were not all that new at it: The men who led the Revolution and created our political institutions were very used to governing themselves. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and John Adams were all members of their respective Colonial legislatures for years before the Declaration of Independence. In fact, these Revolutionaries drew upon a tradition of self-government that went back a century or more.

By the mid-18th century, roughly two out of three adult white male colonists could vote--the highest proportion of voters in the world. (Of course, women, slaves, and men without property could not vote.) By contrast, only about one in six adult males in England could vote for members of Parliament.

One explanation why the French Revolution, which...