ZadekpediaDescription and purpose
On the episode of October 29, 2017, Bob Zadek marked the anniversary of the first Federalist Paper, which he dated to 1788, describing the papers as 85 pieces written by Madison, Jay and Hamilton in New York to persuade New York to vote for ratification of the Constitution. In his account they are often cited as evidence of what the founders meant, a citation he called misplaced: the papers were written to persuade, not to educate, and he noted that the daily blog of the National Constitution Center identified them as essentially a public relations campaign. His advice to listeners was to take their writing with a grain of salt, since they are not legislative history but articles of persuasion Robert Alt of the Buckeye Institute: Power to the States (2017).
Frank H. Buckley made a related point about the papers’ audience and reach. He said people tend to think everybody must have read them, and of course they did not; the roads of America at the time were worse than the Roman roads of 2,000 years before, so the Federalist Papers never really got outside of New York during the ratification debate. Zadek agreed that the audience was very specific, and that nobody cared very much whether people in other colonies read them F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017).
In arguments about the founding
Buckley placed the papers below the convention debates as reading on the structure of liberty. Praising the Framers as brilliant and possessed of a practical reason a mere theoretician would lack, he said their debates are the most fascinating set of readings on the structure of liberty and cannot be beat anywhere else, not even the Federalist Papers. In the same exchange Zadek described James Madison as the man most instrumental at the Convention — not the Father of the Constitution as most Americans believe, but certainly very influential — who each night reconstructed the debates from memory and notes, often verbatim, and kept the book secret for many years so the country would not be affected by the debates Has America Become an “Elective Monarchy”? (2014).
Ilya Somin turned to the papers in discussing judicial review. He argued that judicial review is in the Constitution, citing Article 3’s grant of jurisdiction over cases arising under the laws and the Constitution, and said that is how most of the founding fathers understood things. If you look in the Federalist Papers, he said, James Madison wrote that the courts would be the arbiters of disagreements over the relative scope of powers between the states and the federal government, and it would make no sense to say the courts will decide those issues if the states and the federal government were not required to obey the court’s decision. Zadek noted Hamilton’s observation that the Supreme Court was at the founding the weakest branch, with no armies to enforce its rules and no control over the purse How to Create a Legitimacy Crisis (2019).
The Anti-Federalist comparison
William Watkins Jr. treated the Federalist Papers as one side of a scoreboard. Reviewing the promises of the Federalists — that the Constitution would be limited, that certain clauses would confer no really new powers on the national government but only invigorate existing ones — against the Anti-Federalists’ predictions of what those provisions would actually do, he said it is clear the Anti-Federalists were correct. He named the General Welfare clause at the beginning of Congress’s enumerated powers, the Necessary and Proper clause at the end of them, the Commerce clause, which he said has become a sort of universal jurisdiction for the national government over many matters, and the treaty power, which the Anti-Federalists predicted could be used to undermine the rights of the people and the states. It was almost as if they had a crystal ball, he said, describing them as men dedicated to a form of republicanism stressing government at the local level, what Jefferson would call his ward republics Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017).
Zadek, in the same episode, invited listeners to read a collection called The Anti-Federalist Papers, essays by those who opposed the Constitution, and said their dire predictions — of the king-like power of the president and the reach of the federal government into everyday lives — all happened, to a T. He put the question of whether the Federalists Madison, Hamilton, Jay and others got it wrong in their promises, and whether they knew they were selling something that was not as promised or simply did not understand what they were doing as well as the Anti-Federalists Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017).
Across episodes: the papers as authority
The question of what the Federalist Papers are good for recurs in three episodes without resolving. In the 2017 Watkins episode the papers serve as the Federalists’ side of an accounting that the Anti-Federalists are said to have won; in the 2017 Zadek monologue they are demoted from legislative history to a public relations campaign aimed at one state; in the 2019 Somin exchange they are cited, through Madison, as evidence about the courts’ role. Buckley’s 2014 remark that the convention debates surpass even the Federalist Papers, and his 2017 point that the papers never circulated beyond New York, both cut against treating them as a national record. The episodes show the same text argued over rather than a development in how it is read.