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Atheists: What if there is a God?Nice question.I have a different ideology.If God is there, let it be.If God is not there, couldn't care less.Though I must say, If god is really there,I would like to have a chat with it/him/her/whatever.So yeah, the presence of god would not make much of a difference in my life. I would still be the same person who I am. Nothing would change . I will do what I want to and god will look after what it wants to do.Just because there is a god does not mean I have to follow him. Heck, if there is a god, then there must be a demon/satan too. So even before talking about atheists , you'll have to deal with satan worshipers.Finally, if there is a god, the first thing I would ask him would be : How do magicians do all that awesome stuff?Quora bot feedRobert Frost was bornin San Francisco, California, to journalist WilliamPrescott Frost, Jr., and Isabelle Moodie.[2] His mother wasof Scottishdescent,and his father descended from Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, Devon, England, who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on theWolfrana.Frost's father was ateacher and later an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (whichlater merged with The San Francisco Examiner), and an unsuccessfulcandidate for city tax collector. After his death on May 5, 1885, the familymoved across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts, under the patronage of(Robert's grandfather) William Frost, Sr., who was an overseer at a New Englandmill. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892.[4] Frost's motherjoined the Swedenborgian churchand had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult.Although known for hislater association with rural life, Frost grew up in the city, and he publishedhis first poem in his high school's magazine. He attended Dartmouth College for two months,long enough to be accepted into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frostreturned home to teach and to work at various jobs, including helping hismother teach her class of unruly boys, delivering newspapers, and working in afactory maintaining carbon arc lamps. He did not enjoy thesejobs, feeling his true calling was poetry.In 1894 he sold his firstpoem, "My Butterfly. An Elegy" (published in the November 8, 1894,edition of the New York Independent) for $15 ($409 today). Proud ofhis accomplishment, he proposed marriage to Elinor Miriam White, but shedemurred, wanting to finish college (at St. Lawrence University) before they married.Frost then went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp inVirginia and asked Elinor againupon his return. Having graduated, she agreed, and they were married atLawrence, Massachusetts on December 19, 1895.Frost attended HarvardUniversity from 1897 to 1899, but he left voluntarily due to illness.[5][6][7] Shortly before hisdeath, Frost's grandfather purchased a farm for Robert andElinor in Derry, New Hampshire; Frost worked the farmfor nine years while writing early in the mornings and producing many of thepoems that would later become famous. Ultimately his farming provedunsuccessful and he returned to the field of education as an English teacher atNew Hampshire's Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911,then at the New Hampshire Normal School (nowPlymouth State University) in Plymouth, New Hampshire.In 1912 Frost sailed withhis family to GreatBritain,settling first in Beaconsfield, a small town outsideLondon. His first book of poetry, A Boy's Will, was published the nextyear. In England he made some important acquaintances, including Edward Thomas (a member of the group known asthe Dymock poets), T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound. Although Pound wouldbecome the first American to write a favorable review of Frost's work, Frostlater resented Pound's attempts to manipulate his American prosody. Frost metor befriended many contemporary poets in England, especially after his firsttwo poetry volumes were published in London in 1913 (A Boy's Will) and1914 (North of Boston).

There is no way to know but Victor Lustig is a candidate.“Count” Victor Lustig, 46 years old at the time, was America’s most dangerous con man. In a lengthy criminal career, his sleight-of-hand tricks and get-rich-quick schemes had rocked Jazz-Era America and the rest of the world. In Paris, he had sold the Eiffel Tower in an audacious confidence game—not once, but twice. Finally, in 1935, Lustig was captured after masterminding a counterfeit banknote operation so vast that it threatened to shake confidence in the American economy. A judge in New York sentenced him to 20 years on Alcatraz.Lustig was unlike any other inmate to arrive on the Rock. He dressed like a matinee idol, possessed a hypnotic charm, spoke five languages fluently and evaded the law like a figure from fiction. In fact, the Milwaukee Journal described him as ‘a story book character’. One Secret Service agent wrote that Lustig was “as elusive as a puff of cigarette smoke and as charming as a young girl’s dream,” while the New York Times editorialized: “He was not the hand-kissing type of bogus Count—too keen for that. Instead of theatrical, he was always the reserved, dignified noble man.The fake title was just the tip of Lustig’s deceptions. He used 47 aliases and carried dozens of fake passports. He created a web of lies so thick that even today his true identity remains shrouded in mystery. On his Alcatraz paperwork, prison officials called him “Robert V. Miller,” which was just another of his pseudonyms. The con man had always claimed to hail from a long line of aristocrats who owned European castles, yet newly discovered documents reveal more humble beginnings.In prison interviews, he told investigators that he was born in the Austria-Hungarian town of Hostinné on January 4, 1890. The village is arranged around a Baroque clock tower in the shadow of the Krkonoše mountains (it is now a part of the Czech Republic). During his crime spree, Lustig had boasted that his father, Ludwig, was the burgomaster, or mayor, of the town. But in recently uncovered prison papers, he describes his father and mother as the “poorest peasant people” who raised him in a grim house made from stone. Lustig claimed he stole to survive, but only from the greedy and dishonest.More textured accounts of Lustig’s childhood can be found in various true crime magazines of the time, informed by his criminal associates and investigators. In the early 1900s, as a teenager, Lustig scampered up the criminal ladder, progressing from panhandler to pickpocket, to burglar, to street hustler. According to True Detective Mysteries magazine he perfected every card trick known: “palming, slipping cards from the deck, dealing from the bottom,” and by the time he reached adulthood, Lustig could make a deck of cards “do everything but talk.”First-class passengers aboard transatlantic ships became his first victims. The newly rich were easy pickings. When Lustig arrived in the United States at the end of World War I, the “Roaring Twenties” were in full swing and money was changing hands at a fevered pace. Lustig quickly became known to detectives in 40 American cities as ‘the Scarred,’ thanks to a livid, two-and-a-half inch gash along his left cheekbone, a souvenir from a love rival in Paris. Yet Lustig was a considered a “smoothie” who had never held a gun, and enjoyed mounting butterflies. Records show that he was just five-foot-seven-inches tall and weighed 140 pounds.His most successful scam was the “Rumanian money box.” It was a small box fashioned from cedar wood, with complicated rollers and brass dials. Lustig claimed the contraption could copy banknotes using “Radium.” The big show he gave to victims was sometimes aided by a sidekick named “Dapper” Dan Collins, described by the New York Times as a former ‘circus lion tamer and death-defying bicycle rider.’ Lustig’s repertoire also included fake horse race schemes, feigned seizures during business meetings, and bogus real estate investments. These capers made him a public enemy and a millionaire.America in the 1920s was infested with such confidence rackets, operated by smooth-talking immigrants like Charles Ponzi, namesake of the “Ponzi scheme.” These European con artists were professionals who called their victims ‘marks’ instead of suckers, and who acted not like thugs, but gentlemen. According to the crime magazine True Detective, Lustig was a man who “society took by one hand, the underworld by the other…a flesh-and-blood Jekyll-Hyde.” Yet he treated all women with respect. On November 3, 1919, he married a pretty Kansan named Roberta Noret. A memoir by Lustig’s late daughter recalls how Lustig raised a secret family on whom he lavished his ill-gotten gains. The rest he spent on gambling, and on his lover, Billie Mae Scheible, the buxom owner of a million-dollar prostitution racket.Then, in 1925, he embarked upon what swindling experts call “the big store.”Lustig arrived in Paris in May of that year, according to the memoir of U.S. Secret Service agent James Johnson. There, Lustig commissioned stationary carrying the official French government seal. Next, he presented himself at the front desk of the Hôtel de Crillon, a stone palace on the Place de la Concorde. From there, pretending to be a French government official, Lustig wrote to the top people in the French scrap metal industry, inviting them to the hotel for a meeting.“Because of engineering faults, costly repairs, and political problems I cannot discuss, the tearing down of the Eiffel Tower has become mandatory,” he reportedly told them in a quiet hotel room. The tower would be sold to the highest bidder, he announced. His audience was captivated, and their bids flowed in. It was a scam Lustig pulled off more than once, sources said. Amazingly, the con man liked to boast of his criminal achievements, and even penned a list of rules for would-be swindlers. They’re still circulated today:Like many career criminals, it was greed that led to Lustig’s demise. On December 11, 1928, businessman Thomas Kearns invited Lustig to his Massachusetts home to discuss an investment. Lustig crept upstairs and stole $16,000 from a drawer. Such a barefaced theft was out of character for the con man, and Kearns screamed to the police. Next, Lustig had the audacity to trick a Texas sheriff with his moneybox, and later gave him counterfeit cash, which attracted the attention of the Secret Service. “Victor Lustig was [a] top man in the modern world of crime” wrote another agent called Frank Seckler, “He was the only one I ever heard of who swindled the law.”Yet it was Secret Service agent Peter A. Rubano who vowed to put Lustig behind bars. Rubano was a heavy-set Italian-American with a double chin, sad eyes, and endless ambition. Born and raised in the Bronx, Rubano had made his name by trapping the notorious gangster Ignazio “The Wolf” Lupo. Rubano delighted in seeing his name in the newspapers, and he would dedicate many years to catching Lustig. When the Austrian entered the counterfeit banknote business in 1930, Lustig fell under Rubano’s crosshairs.Teaming up with gangland forger William Watts, Lustig created banknotes so flawless they fooled even bank tellers. “Lustig-Watts notes were the supernotes of the era,” says Joseph Boling, chief judge of the American Numismatic Association, a specialist in authenticating notes. Lustig daringly chose to copy $100 bills, those scrutinized most by bank tellers, and became “like some other government, issuing money in rivalry with the United States Treasury,” a judge later commented. It was feared that a run of fake bills this large could wobble international confidence in the dollar.Catching the count became a cat-and-mouse game for Rubano and the Secret Service. Lustig traveled with a trunk of disguises and could transform easily into a rabbi, a priest, a bellhop or a porter. Dressed like a baggage man, he could escape any hotel in a pinch—and even take his luggage with him. But the net was closing inLustig finally felt a tug on the velvet-collar of his Chesterfield coat on a New York street corner on May 10, 1935. A voice ordered: “Hands in the air”. Lustig studied the circle of men surrounding him, and noticed Agent Rubano, who led him away in handcuffs. It was a victory for the Secret Service. But not for long.On the Sunday before Labor Day, September 1, 1935, Lustig escaped from the ‘inescapable’ Federal Detention Center in Manhattan. He fashioned a rope from bed sheets, cut through his bars, and swung from the window like an urban Tarzan. When a group of onlookers stopped and pointed, the prisoner took a rag from his pocket and pretended to be a window cleaner. Landing on his feet, Lustig gave his audience a polite bow, and then sprinted away ‘like a deer.’ Police dashed to his cell. They discovered a handwritten note on his pillow, an extract from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables:He allowed himself to be led in a promise; Jean Valjean had his promise. Even to a convict, especially to a convict. It may give the convict confidence and guide him on the right path. Law was not made by God and Man can be wrong.Lustig evaded the law until the Saturday night of September 28, 1935. In Pittsburgh, the dashing crook ducked into a waiting car on the city’s north side. Watching from a hiding position, FBI agent G. K. Firestone gave the signal to Pittsburgh Secret Service agent Fred Gruber. The two federal officers leapt into their car and gave chase.For nine blocks their vehicles rode neck-and-neck, engines roaring. When Lustig’s driver refused to stop, the agents rammed their car into his, locking their wheels together. Sparks flew. The cars crashed to a halt. The agents pulled their service weapons and threw open the doors. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Lustig told his captors:“Well, boys, here I am.”Count Victor Lustig was hauled before the judge in New York in November 1935. “His pale, lean face was a study and his tapering white hands rested on the bar before the bench,” observed a reporter from the New York Herald-Tribune. Just before sentencing, another journalist overheard a Secret Service agent tell Lustig:“Count, you’re the smoothest con man that ever lived.”As soon as he stepped onto Alcatraz Island, prison guards searched Lustig’s body for concealed watch springs and razor blades and hosed him down with freezing seawater. They marched him along the main corridor between the cells—known as ‘Broadway’—in his birthday suit. There was a chorus of howls, whistles, and the clanging of metal cups against bars. “He is somewhat superficially humiliated,” Lustig’s prison record said, referring to him as ‘Miller’, “he asserts that he was accused of everything in the category of crime, including the burning of Chicago.”Whatever his true identity, the cold weather took its toll on prisoner #300. By December 7, 1946, Lustig had made a staggering 1,192 medical requests and filled 507 prescriptions. The prison guards believed he was faking, that his illness was part of an escape plan. They even found torn bed sheets in his cell, signs of his expert rope making. According to medical reports, Lustig was “inclined to magnify physical complaints... [and] constantly complaining of real and imaginary ills.” He was transferred to a secure medical facility in Springfield, Missouri, where doctors soon realized he was not faking. There, he died from complications arising from pneumonia.Somehow, Lustig’s family kept his death a secret for two years, until August 31, 1949. But Lustig’s Houdini-like departure from earth was not even his greatest deception. In March of 2015, a historian named Tomáš Anděl, from Lustig’s home town of Hostinné, began a tireless search for biographical information about the town’s most famous citizen. He searched through records rescued from Nazi bonfires, pored over electoral rolls and historical documents. “He must have attended school in Hostinné,” Anděl reasoned in the Hostinné Bulletin, “yet he is not even mentioned in the list of pupils attending the local primary school.” After much searching, Anděl concluded, there is not a scrap of evidence that Lustig was ever born.We may never know the true identity of Count Victor Lustig. But we do know for certain that the world’s most flamboyant con man died at 8:30pm on March 11, 1947. On his death certificate a clerk wrote this for his occupation:‘Apprentice salesman.’LUSTIG’S TEN COMMANDMENTS OF THE CON1. Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast talking, that gets a con-man his coups).2. Never look bored.3. Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them.4. Let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones.5. Hint at sex talk, but don’t follow it up unless the other fellow shows a strong interest.6. Never discuss illness, unless some special concern is shown.7. Never pry into a person’s personal circumstances (they’ll tell you all eventually).8. Never boast. Just let your importance be quietly obvious.9. Never be untidy.10. Never get drunk.The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower. Twice.Victor Lustig - WikipediaVictor LustigCounterfeiter. Lustig’s downfall. It was a woman, or two.

10 Things You May Not Know About James MadisonAt just 5'4", James Madison was hardly a commanding presence, but that didn't stop him from shaping American history.1. He was America’s smallest president.Madison was a sickly and slightly built man who stood just 5 feet 4 inches tall and rarely tipped the scales at much more than 100 pounds. His voice was so weak that people often had difficulty hearing his speeches, and he was plagued by recurring bouts of “bilious fever” and what he described as “a constitutional liability to sudden attacks, somewhat resembling epilepsy.” While contemporaries praised Madison’s fierce intelligence, many also made note of his small size and timid demeanor. The wife of a Virginia politician once labeled him “the most unsociable creature in existence.”Portrait of James Madison. (Credit: Public Domain)James Madison | Biography, Founding Father, & Presidency2. Madison was Princeton University’s first graduate student.In 1769, an 18-year-old Madison left his family’s Montpelier plantation to attend the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). He proceeded to blaze through the four-year course in only two years, often sleeping just four hours a night to make time for reading law and Greek and Roman philosophy. Though a natural scholar, Madison was still unsure of what career path to take after graduating, so he remained at Princeton for another year and studied Hebrew and other subjects under the direction of the school’s president, John Witherspoon. While Madison wasn’t awarded an advanced degree, the University now considers him its original graduate student.3. He once lost an election because he didn’t give alcohol to voters.Following a stint in the Virginia Convention in 1776, a young James Madison lost a 1777 bid for election to the state’s House of Delegates. He would later write that the defeat was the result of his refusal to provide free liquor to the voters on Election Day, a common custom then known as “swilling the planters with bumbo.” The future president believed that bribing electors with booze was contrary to republican principles, but one of his opponents—who also happened to be a tavern keeper—simply “adhered to the old practice” and raked in the votes. Despite the setback, Madison was soon chosen for an open seat on Virginia’s Council of State. By 1780, the 29-year-old was serving as the youngest delegate to the Continental Congress.4. Madison had a longstanding rivalry with Patrick Henry.Madison’s friendship with Thomas Jefferson is considered one of the most fruitful political partnerships in American history, but he also had a lengthy and often bitter rivalry with the famed “Give me liberty, or give me death” orator Patrick Henry. The two clashed over the separation of church and state while serving in the Virginia House of Delegates, and Henry later became one of the most outspoken leaders of the Anti-Federalist faction that opposed Madison’s efforts to ratify the Constitution. During Virginia’s ratifying convention, the pair engaged in a now-famous debate, with Henry saying the Constitution “endangered the public liberty” and Madison countering that Henry’s arguments were “ill founded” and distorted “the natural construction of language.” Madison and his supporters eventually won the day—Virginia voted to ratify the Constitution by a margin of 89 to 79—but the bad blood remained. Henry blocked Madison’s appointment to the U.S. Senate in 1788, and was later accused of gerrymandering Virginia’s voting districts in a failed attempt to prevent Madison from winning a seat in the House of Representatives.5. He was initially opposed to the Bill of Rights.While Madison drafted the Bill of Rights and introduced it to Congress in 1789, he originally thought the amendments were unnecessary and potentially harmful. Like many Federalists, he believed the Constitution’s separation of powers already adequately protected personal freedoms, and he worried that any rights not explicitly enshrined in a “parchment barrier” would be easily infringed. Madison only changed his mind after concluding that the lack of a Bill of Rights would be a major stumbling block in winning over his opponents and getting the Constitution ratified. He also came to believe that the amendments might ingrain certain freedoms into the national consciousness and “be a good ground for an appeal” whenever the government overstepped its bounds. Though still lukewarm on the need for a Bill of Rights—he privately described it as a “nauseous project”—Madison eventually took the lead in shepherding it through the legislative process.Portrait of Dolley Madison. (Credit: Public Domain)6. Dolley Madison helped define the role of first lady.In contrast to Madison’s quiet and retiring personality, his wife Dolley was a social butterfly known for her exuberance, warmth and wit. When Madison began his first term as president in 1809, she embraced the role of first lady and helped define its duties by redecorating the White House and hosting the first ever Inaugural Ball. By serving as the “directress” of an orphanage for young girls, she also started the tradition of first ladies taking on a public outreach project. Dolley proved particularly effective in her job as the White House hostess. Her weekly receptions became a hot ticket among foreign dignitaries, intellectuals and politicians, leading writer Washington Irving to remark on the “blazing splendor of Mrs. Madison’s drawing room.”7. Both of Madison’s vice presidents died in office.Despite his lifelong struggles with his health, Madison proved to be more resilient than his vice presidents. His original VP George Clinton died in 1812, and Clinton’s successor Elbridge Gerry later suffered a fatal hemorrhage in 1814, just a year and a half after taking office. Having lost two vice presidents in less than three years, Madison finished his second term without a recognized number two.British Embassy in Washington holds party over White House burningView of the White House after the conflagration in August 24, 1814. (Credit: Heritage Images/Getty Images)8. He was one of the only presidents to accompany troops into battle.Other than Abraham Lincoln, who was present at the Battle of Fort Stevens during the Civil War, Madison is the only sitting commander-in-chief to be directly involved in a military engagement. When British forces marched on Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812, the bookish president borrowed a pair of dueling pistols from his treasury secretary and set off for the American lines to help rally his troops. He and his entourage nearly blundered into British forces upon arriving, and they soon heard the whistle of enemy Congreve rockets overhead, prompting Madison to tell his cabinet secretaries that it “would be proper to withdraw to a position in the rear.” After American militiamen were put to a rout, Madison joined his troops in fleeing the city, leaving the victorious British free to torch the White House and U.S. Capitol. Madison was able to return to Washington a few days later, but damage to the executive mansion forced him to take up residence in the city’s Octagon House.9. One of Madison’s slaves wrote the first White House memoir.One of the most interesting accounts of Madison’s life came courtesy of Paul Jennings, a black slave who was born into bondage on his Montpelier plantation. Jennings accompanied the newly elected President to the White House as a boy, and eventually spent nearly three decades serving as Madison’s footman and manservant before purchasing his freedom in 1847. He later recounted his experiences in 1865’s “A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison,” a short book now considered the first memoir of life in the White House. Along with a look at Madison, whom Jennings describes as a temperate man who “always dressed wholly in black” and never owned more than one suit, the memoir also includes a firsthand account of the evacuation of the White House during the War of 1812, during which Dolley Madison oversaw the rescue of a famous portrait of George Washington.10. He declined an offer to prolong his life until July 4.After leaving the presidency, Madison returned to his Montpelier plantation and spent his later years farming and serving as the second rector of his friend Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia. When the 85-year-old was later on his deathbed in the summer of 1836, his doctor suggested that he take stimulants to keep him alive until July 4, the same historic date that Jefferson, John Adams and James Monroe had all perished. Madison turned down the offer, however, and instead died on June 28—six days before the 60th anniversary of the nation’s birth. At the time, he was the last surviving signer of the Constitution.James Madison, detail of an oil painting by Asher B. Durand, 1833; in the collection of The New-York Historical Society.Cartoon showing Pres. James Madison fleeing from Washington, D.C., which is being burned by the British, during the War of 1812.James Madison: Architect of the Constitution?Ray RaphaelHere we go again. The publication of Lynne Cheney’s new blockbuster biography of James Madison revives one of our most cherished founding myths: Madison was the “father” (assertive textbook version) or “chief architect” (modification for a more sophisticated audience) of the Constitution. The New York Times headline writers selected “American Architect” to announce Gordon Wood’s review of Cheney’s book. This honorific appellation calls forth Madison’s claim to fame and his tug on our hearts.Much is at stake here. If Madison were truly the chief architect of the Constitution, what he said and wrote (in 1787) bears heavily on the meaning of that document. Through the imprecise doctrines of original intent and original meaning, so pervasive in our political culture, Madison’s views become scripture. Then, if we casually omit the key words “in 1787,” what he did, said, or wrote at any time in his career wind up guiding Constitutional interpretation. Madison conceived the Constitution. Madison believed thusly, so that’s what the Constitution says. Our public policy, to follow the Constitution, must follow James Madison. By applying this sloppy syllogism, pundits, politicians, and Supreme Court justices can redirect the course of the nation. It all starts with that initial premise: James Madison, American Architect.Was Madison the (chief) architect of the Constitution? An architect lays out a plan that that will be put into effect. Even metaphorically, this does not describe James Madison’s relation to the United States Constitution.In fact, Madison did not always get his way at the Federal Convention of 1787. By one tabulation, he offered an opinion on 71 motions but lost out on 40 of these.[1]This is not to denigrate Madison in any way; perhaps we would have been better off if other framers had followed his advice more often. But if Madison had had his way, the edifice created by the Convention would look very different than it does.Balance of powers. Madison is often given credit for the Constitution’s equilibrium, but separating powers and then achieving a balance among them was Montesquieu 101, common wisdom at the Convention. The question was what, exactly, would be the best balance, and James Madison’s vision was not actualized. He believed that the president should be advised not by a cabinet of his own choosing but by a separate and independent executive council. This council, not the Senate, should check presidential appointments. Members of the Supreme Court would join the president in a revisionary council empowered to veto acts of Congress, but Congress could override their veto by a three-quarters vote. Judges belonging to this council would review laws before, not after, they take effect and would not have to find constitutional irregularities to negate them. If impeached, the president would be tried by the Supreme Court, not the Senate. This is not the same system of checks and balances we encounter in civics texts and see in the everyday operations of our government.Bicameral legislature. This was common practice in British political culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Madison’s implementation, though, would have differed from what we see in the Constitution. Senators would serve for nine years, not six, and the number of senators would be proportional to state populations. After six weeks of debating this last proposition, when delegates finally decided that representation in only one house would be proportional, Madison did not go along with this “Great Compromise,” as we call it today. With fellow Virginians and others from large states, he caucused to plot a new strategy for pushing proportional representation, and when that fell through, he grumbled.The executive. Shortly before the convention, in a letter to George Washington, Madison jotted down his ideas for a new government. (Henry Knox and John Jay also sent Washington their ideas.) The alleged “architect” had much to say about a national legislature and a national judiciary, but very little to say about a national executive: “I have scarcely ventured as yet to form my opinion either of the manner in which it ought to be constituted or of the authorities with which it ought to be cloathed,” he confessed.[2] During the Convention, he did not play a leading role in fashioning the executive branch. He fixed his gaze on an executive council but never came close to achieving majority support for that position. In his view, the president should not hold the exclusive authority to negotiate treaties. Because a president derived “so much power and importance from a state of war,” Madison contended, the Senate should be able to conclude a treaty of peace without his assent.[3] Yes, Madison displayed great insight, but no, he did not prevail. Of course no framer got what he wanted, and that is precisely the point. It was give-and-take all the way, constitution-by-committee. That is not how chief architects generally work.State and federal powers. Madison’s greatest achievement, many say, is his finely tuned plan for shared sovereignty, with states and the federal government each supreme in their separate spheres. Madison expressed such a view later, but in 1787 he showed a distinct preference for federal power. The national legislature, he wrote to Washington before the Convention, should be empowered to negate“in all cases whatsoever [his emphasis] … the legislative acts of the States, as heretofore exercised by the Kingly prerogative.” If a state law, in the opinion of Congress, ran counter to national interests, it must go; unconstitutionality would not be a requirement for dismissing it. “The right of coercion should be expressly declared,” he continued. Despite “the difficulty & awkwardness of operating by force on the collective will of a State,” armed federal intervention in state affairs must be permitted.[4]During the Convention, on three different occasions, Madison tried to grant the federal government this absolute “negative” (what we now call a veto) over all state legislation. “As the greatest danger is that of disunion of the States, it is necessary to guard agat. it by sufficient powers to the Common Govt.” – but the one power he thought necessary to prevent disunion, the federal veto, was repeatedly and definitively rejected.[5]Eleven days before the Convention adjourned, Madison complained to Thomas Jefferson, in Paris at the time, that because his proposal for a federal negative of state legislation had been turned down, “the plan should it be adopted will neither effectually answer its national object nor prevent … local mischiefs.”[6] This one flaw could prove fatal, he feared. After the Convention, once all was said and done, he wrote again to Jefferson:A check on the States appears to me necessary 1. to prevent encroachments on the General authority. 2. to prevent instability and injustice in the legislation of the States. Without such a check in the whole over the parts, our system involves the evil of imperia in imperio. If a compleat supremacy some where is not necessary in every Society, a controuling power at least is so, by which the general authority may be defended against encroachments of the subordinate authorities.Without a sweeping national veto, even in matters of seemingly local concern, states would be able to “oppress the weaker party within their respective jurisdictions,” he concluded.[7] The Constitution, too weak, had fallen short. In the words of Jack Rakove, Madison “viewed all the decisions that had diluted his system not as necessary compromises but as fundamental errors in judgment.”[8]Strict construction of the Constitution. Today, we attribute to Madison the notion that Constitutional powers of the federal government were “few and defined,” as he stated in Federalist No. 45 to assuage fears of federal overreach during the ratification debates. But while Madison talked the talk, he did not always walk the walk. After the Constitution had been ratified, as a representative from Virginia to the First Federal Congress, he behaved as many loose constructionists do, approving matters he liked even if these are not covered within specific provisions of the Constitution:*On April 20, 1789, two men asked Congress to support a private scientific expedition to Baffin’s Bay that would investigate the magnetic north pole. Despite the Constitution’s silence on such matters, Madison was willing to endorse the measure. If “there is a probability of improving the science of navigation, I see no reason against it.” At the Federal Convention, on August 18, Madison had proposed that Congress be empowered “to encourage by premiums & provisions, the advancement of useful knowledge and discoveries,” but his proposition had not been adopted. That defeat did not matter to Madison now. Congress still had the authority to “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States,” and those broad powers would have to suffice. It was a very loose construction.[9]*The following day, Madison spoke in support of a six-cents-per-ton duty on commercial vessels, which he argued would be “necessary for the support of light-houses, hospitals for disabled seamen, and other establishments incident to commerce.” At the Federal Convention, on September 15, he had stated that an “object for tonnage Duties” was to provide for “support of Seamen etc.” and that this federal disability program would be covered under Congress’s power “to regulate commerce.” It was an expansive interpretation of the often contested “commerce clause” (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3), a view we usually associate with Hamilton, the broad constructionist, not Madison, the soon-to-be strict constructionist.[10]*In 1790, when Congress established the first federal census to apportion representation among the states, Madison suggested that the census take advantage of “the present opportunity” to gather valuable information that went well beyond “the bare enumeration of the inhabitants,” its express purpose as stated in the Constitution. If the census provided a “description of the several classes [occupations] into which the community is divided,” he said, that information would prove “extremely useful, when we come to pass laws, affecting any particular description of people.”[11] It was a good measure, he felt, and that was reason enough to pass it. Stretching the census past its specified constitutional function did not trouble him nearly so much as it seems to trouble Michele Bachmann and other strict constructionists today.Madison saw nothing inconsistent in his actions. At the Federal Convention on August 20, he had not only endorsed what we know today as the “elastic” clause, but he had also tried to clarify and strengthen it by adding the words in italics: “And to make all laws and establish all offices necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested, by this Constitution, in the Government of the U. S. or any department or officer thereof.”[12] While Madison’s addition never made the final cut, the rest of the clause engendered no debate and was passed “nem. con” – without dissent. The framers, including Madison, understood there needed to be limits, but these must be reasonably interpreted. They refused to declare unfalteringly for “strict” or for “broad” construction because either choice, unmodified, would have been untenable. Without enumerating powers, the Constitution would permit the indefinite expansion of federal authority, yet without the flexibility inherent in implied powers, the government they were creating would quickly become inoperative.In the First Federal Congress, Madison toed this line with precision. When he proposed constitutional amendments that would later evolve into the Bill of Rights, he included a clear statement of the principle of enumerated powers: “The powers not delegated by this constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively.” That statement, though, was not enough for South Carolina representative Thomas Tudor Tucker, who moved to insert the key word “expressly” before “delegated.” This would keep any so-called implied powers from ever sneaking in.[13]Madison opposed the explicit limitation. “It was impossible to confine a Government to the exercise of express powers,” he argued. “There must necessarily be admitted powers by implication, unless the Constitution descended to recount every minutia.” In fact, Madison had purposely removed the word “expressly” from the amendment that Massachusetts had first proposed, “All Powers not expressly delegated by the aforesaid Constitution are reserved to the several States to be by them exercised.”[14] In a roll call vote, Congress followed Madison’s lead and rejected Tucker’s motion, seventeen to thirty-two. Federal powers did not need to be “expressly” stipulated, Madison suggested and the First Federal Congress expressly affirmed.[15]Two years later, during the National Bank controversy, Madison adjusted his stance. He opposed Hamilton’s bank on its merits, but he also argued against it on constitutional principles. When Washington asked him to draft a veto message in case the president decided to take that route, here is what Madison wrote: “I object to the Bill because it is an essential principle of the Government that powers not delegated by the Constitution cannot be rightfully exercised; because the power proposed by the bill to be received is not expressly delegated; and because I cannot satisfy myself that it results from any express power by fair and safe rules of implication.” For Madison, as for so many others since, “delegated” was upgraded to “expressly delegated.” True, he still entertained the possibility of implication, but that standard was difficult to define and even more difficult to meet.[16]By 1798, piqued by the Alien and Sedition Acts, Madison had swayed yet farther from his preference for expansive federal powers. The states, he argued in the Virginia Resolutions, had the right to “interpose” between the federal government and the people. This is how Madison comes down to us in the standard telling of history: a strict constructionist averse to federal authority. That he did not embrace such “Madisonian” views in 1787 is acknowledged sometimes within academic circles but barely at all in textbooks, popular histories, or most significantly, political dialogue. It should not surprise us when public figures modify prior positions to address new contingencies, and we err if we ignore basic chronology and fail to take such adjustments into account.[17]Why does any of this matter?Viewing Madison as the architect of the Constitution has political overtones. Madison’s ideological evolution, from his expansive nationalism in 1787 to his advocacy of strict construction and states’ rights in the 1790s, can be and is manipulated into a distorted view of the Constitution’s meaning. If the alleged architect of the Constitution said the powers of the federal government are limited to those that are “expressly delegated” in the Constitution and states have the right to “interpose” between the people and the federal government, enemies of federal power backdate these words, implicitly but erroneously, to 1787. Once there, they become proof positive that the Constitution favored the states. Madison-the-Architect said so.This unwarranted notion has penetrated to the core of our public discourse. It informs constitutional jurisprudence at the highest levels and affects national policy. In their dissent to the 2012 Affordable Care Act decision, Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito complained that the “power to tax and spend for the general welfare” has unfortunately come to extend “beyond (what Madison thought it meant) taxing and spending for those aspects of the general welfare that were within the Federal Government’s enumerated powers.”[18]The words within parentheses speak volumes. “What Madison thought it meant,” in this context, stands for “what the founders thought it meant” and finally “what the Constitution really means.” On this view, Madison supposedly favored a strictly limited government, so that is what the document must prescribe. However misguided, Madison-the-Architect mythology is embedded within the default logic of constitutional reasoning, and it tilts that reasoning subtly yet significantly toward the right.***Ray Raphael’s latest book is Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right (The New Press, 2013).X-posted at History News Network.[1] Melanie Randolph Miller, An Incautious Man: The Life of Gouverneur Morris(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008), 63.[2] Madison to Washington, April 16, 1787, Robert A. Rutland et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison (Chicago and Charlottesville, 1962–), Congressional Series, 9:384-385.[3] Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, September 7.[4] Madison to Washington, April 16, 1787, Madison, Papers 9:383-85.[5] Madison, Notes of Debates, August 23.[6] Madison to Jefferson, September 6, 1787, Madison, Papers, 10:163-64.[7] Madison to Jefferson, October 24, 1787, Madison, Papers, 10:207-14.[8] Jack N. Rakove, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic(Glenview, Illinois: Scott Foresman/Little, Brown, 1990), 68.[9] Annals of Congress 1:178-79; David P. Currie, The Constitution in Congress: The Federalist Period, 1789-1801 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 71.[10] Annals of Congress 1:183; Currie, The Constitution in Congress, 70.[11] Annals of Congress 1:1115, 1145-46 (January 25 and February 2, 1790); Currie, The Constitution in Congress, 19-20.[12] Madison, Notes of Debates, August 20.[13] Annals of Congress, 1:453, 790 (June 8 and August 18, 1789).[14] Annals of Congress, 1:790 (August 18, 1789).[15] Annals of Congress, 1:797 (August 21, 1789).[16] Madison to Washington, February 21, 1791, W.W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Papers of George Washington (Charlottesville, 1983–), Presidential Series, 7:395.[17] Virginia Resolutions, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/virres.asp[18] Supreme Court of the United States, National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services (2012), Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito, JJ., dissenting, 3. URL:http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdfConstitutional Myths and Realities - Imprimis