To the Editor:
While it doesn't seem very PC to write in defense of white men these days, after reading Anna Holster's column ("The real founding fathers," DP, 2/1/2005), I had to say something.
Ms. Holster implies that "ethnocentric" motivations kept the supposedly true roots of the Constitution from the realm of public information. She goes on to all but accuse white men of covering up the fact that the U.S. Constitution is based entirely on American Indian ideology, for no reason other than to suppress minorities.
Now, I am neither denying, nor affirming, that the Constitution of the Five Nations may have had an influence on its American counterpart, but Ms. Holster's suggestion that it was the only influence borders on absurdity. European philosophy and emerging ideas about the rights of man have been implicated in the conception of the Constitution more times that I care to count.
The colonists who drafted the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution had free access to these European ideas as much as to any others. To discount the very obvious connection between these white European philosophies and the U.S. Constitution for reasons based only on the skin color of the writers is as wrong as what Ms. Holster accuses the white men of doing.
Roman Geykhman
Engineering '07
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