RE THE FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE? DK

Professor

This is, apparently, your method for finding out on what the nation was founded:

"...Our nation, as I have seen clearly reading early presidential addresses, was founded on the principle that human reason could promote the greatest good for the greatest number, and that elected governments could work...." DK

My suggestion is to look instead at Bailin, Ideological Origins; Clark, The Language of Liberty; and to a lesser extent, Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, and Catholics and Unbelievers.

None of the founders, or any president before the Civil War, certainly, ever dreamed of such a thing as "the greatest good for the greatest number". That is the purest of Whiggist historicism.

All the best

Professor

Very kind of you to take issue with this flagrant remark.

It is great, it seems to me, to do something now unfashionable.

Yet, I think "None of the founders...' stands quite firm.

At least Van Buren and Harrison, however, do ante date the Civil War.

But Grant does not.

I do not know what they mouthed in speeches.

Perhaps, as you assert, it was Benthamism. 

His first works were knee jerk atheist reactions to Deist William Blackstone's Commentaries.

I very seriously doubt that any of them, founders or Presidents,  were ever rank utilitarians.

This is it, more or less:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/

All the best

I will just add, as a kind of footnote and reference, Clark, J. C. D. , Our Shadowed Present, especially pp 124 through 137, and other references to Bentham, Mill(s), Index; Clark, Thomas Paine, Index, Bentham.

The earlier British Empiricist formulation had read something like:

"The greatest sensations of pleasure and avoidance of sensations of pain for the most Englishmen."

The American rebel colonists were neither actuated nor informed by Reason, Locke, or Utilitarianism. 

Bailyn made this enormous fact plain in a wonderful book, cited above, which won both the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes.