The Fox Nation segment with Eric Shawn and Peter Michael argued that John Hanson (and a handful of others) held the title “President of the United States in Congress Assembled” under the Articles of Confederation (1781-1789). Michael, as a descendant and author of a biography on Hanson, argues this makes Hanson chronologically the “first president” of the original U.S. government before the Constitution created the modern executive office.
ERIC SHAWN’S “CRAZY AMERICAN HISTORY”
FOX NATION’S NEW SEGMENT “CRAZY AMERICAN HISTORY WITH ERIC SHAWN” is a recent segment hosted by Eric Shawn, a Fox News senior correspondent and host of the series “Crazy American History with Eric Shawn.” He interviews Peter Michael, author of the book Remembering John Hanson: A Biography of the First President of the Original United States Government and a descendant of John Hanson. Togethert, they discuss the historical role of John Hanson (and others) as presiding officers of the Continental and its successor, the Confederation Congress under the Articles of Confederation. Peter Michael presented the view that Hanson was the “first president” in a chronological and sense before the U.S. Constitution created the modern executive presidency.
Though a minor issue, it is one of the examples of the tactic of conservative media. I do not argue that it consequentially leads to anything greatly negative and invites debate about the history and the Confederation period. It is very important to understand this history, rather than engaging in cartoonish villainization of the Founders.
Eric Shawn has worked since the network’s launch in 1996. Based in New York, he co-anchors weekend programs and is known for his coverage of politics, terrorism, and investigative reporting. Over his career, Shawn has interviewed world leaders such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Benjamin Netanyahu, reported extensively from the United Nations, and produced documentaries including Riddle: The Search for James R. Hoffa. He is also the author of The U.N. Exposed (2006), reflecting his critical reporting on international institutions, and the UN as an institution plagued by corruption, bureaucracy, and political bias, particularly against democracies and Israel, while giving cover to authoritarian regimes. He is in this interview creating a usable past that aligns with present political needs while introducing the very intellectual tensions I have lately mentioned.
THE PURPOSE OF THE SEGMENT
The Hanson segment is minor historical revisionism at the margins, more pedantic than paradigm-shifting. While this does not drive or exemplify a conservative turn toward post-constitutionalism, serious engagement with the Confederation period tends to avoid answering whether the constitutional settlement of 1787-1789 was a deliberate improvement worth defending or restoring. Post-constitutional currents exist on the right (as on the left), but they rest on analyses of current power structures and philosophy. Accurate history of the founding era, including its transitions, is compatible with constitutional fidelity, and it does not require or naturally produce its rejection.
Although, it is a minor selective historical revisionism of the segment, it serves contemporary conservatism (and outlets like Fox News) in several interlocking ways, but this does so at the expense of a coherent defense of the republican tradition. Any historical revision that complicates the “sacred founding” story could rhetorically soften attachment to the Constitution by presenting American governance as a series of replaceable experiments from the Confederation to the Constitution and so on. Framing the Hanson era as “the first government” and the constitutional era as “the second” invites the inference that a “third” is possible or necessary when the current one “fails.”
THE HISTORICAL RECORD ON THE CONFEDERATION CONGRESS
Lets establish the finer points from the beginning with an accurate historical record compared to the revisionism implied by Peter Michael.
- July 4, 1776: The Continental Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence. This publicly declared the colonies’ intention to become an independent nation and dissolved political ties with Britain. It was not the creation of a new government structure.
- 1777-1781: The Articles of Confederation are drafted and ratified (fully effective March 1, 1781). This was the first governing document of the United States. It created a weak central government where the Continental Congress (later Confederation Congress) held most power. There was no separate executive branch and no office of “President of the United States.”
- Presidents of the Continental and its successor, the Confederation Congress: From 1774 to 1789, Congress elected a series of presiding officers (roughly 14-16 individuals depending on how terms are counted). These included Peyton Randolph, John Hancock, Henry Laurens, John Jay, Samuel Huntington, Thomas McKean, John Hanson, Elias Boudinot, Thomas Mifflin, Richard Henry Lee, Nathaniel Gorham, Arthur St. Clair, and Cyrus Griffin (the last). Their role was primarily ceremonial and legislative, and they chaired sessions of Congress, signed documents, and handled protocol. Under the Articles, the title was sometimes styled “President of the United States in Congress Assembled,” but this was not an executive presidency with independent powers. The Congress itself acted collectively as the executive. These men are not recognized by the U.S. government, historians, or official records as Presidents of the United States, yet some consider them founding fathers.
- 1787: The Constitutional Convention drafts the U.S. Constitution, which creates a new framework with three separate branches, including a strong, independent President of the United States (Article II).
- 1788: The Constitution is ratified by the required nine states (New Hampshire on June 21, 1788). The new government is scheduled to begin operations on March 4, 1789.
- December 15, 1788 – January 10, 1789: The first presidential election under the Constitution takes place. Electors are chosen by the states.
- April 6, 1789: Congress counts the electoral votes.
- April 30, 1789: George Washington is inaugurated in New York City as the first President of the United States under the Constitution. He was elected unanimously by the Electoral College.
Peter Michael is conflating two entirely different offices. The earlier congressional presiding officers held a different, largely ceremonial legislative role under the Articles of Confederation. These “Presidents of the Continental and Confederation Congress” were presiding officers of a legislative body under the weak Articles of Confederation. They had no independent executive authority, no veto power, no cabinet, and no national executive role comparable to the modern presidency. The difference from the President of the United States, is that it is a constitutional office created in 1787 with real executive power. Washington was the first person to hold that office.
Official U.S. government sources (White House historical records, the U.S. House of Representatives, the National Archives, and Mount Vernon) all list George Washington as the first President of the United States. They do not count the earlier congressional presiding officers in the presidential line.
Washington was asked by the Continental Congress (in 1775) to serve as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, which was a military role, not a presidential one. The new constitutional government later asked him to serve as its first President.
The U.S. did not become “the United States of America” only upon ratification in 1788. Independence was declared in 1776, and the actual constitutional government began in 1789.
There in fact did not exist fourteen presidents before Washington in any official sense recognized by the United States. Those were congressional presiding officers under a different system. The Declaration of Independence was more than “just intentions.” The Declaration of Independence was the formal act of separation that created the new nation in the eyes of the world and its own people. The revisionism is not serious history. George Washington was the first President of the United States. The earlier congressional presiding officers held a different, far weaker office under a different governing document. Claims otherwise rely on conflating titles while ignoring the fundamental change in government structure that occurred with the Constitution in 1789.
MEDIA CONSERVATISM
This kind of contrarian take can lead to the suggestion that the constitutional order itself rests on shaky or deceptive foundations (or that “real” authority predates the Constitution), and subtly validates populist skepticism toward procedural norms, courts, bureaucracy, and inherited institutions. This aligns with strains of conservatism that view the post-1789 system as already compromised, and this allows conservatism to claim the mantle of the Founding while simultaneously distancing itself from aspects of the constitutional settlement that later conservatives found inconvenient such as strong central institutions, procedural checks, and Enlightenment-derived rights language.
This is not unique, since right-left-leaning revisionism has long reframed the Founding as irredeemably tainted by slavery, patriarchy, or bourgeois interests to justify more radical breaks with inherited institutions. Both versions weaken shared attachment to the actual constitutional project.
CONNECTION TO Russell Kirk and Traditionalist Conservatism
Russell Kirk’s project in The Conservative Mind (1953) and related works was precisely this kind of reframing. He presented the American Founders not primarily as Enlightenment innovators or Lockean liberals who broke with tradition, but as conservatives in the Burkean sense. This depiction of the American Founders depicted them as men defending inherited liberties, prescription, and ordered liberty against radical abstraction and leveling.
Kirk emphasized continuity with Western (especially British) tradition, the importance of prescription and prejudice, and skepticism toward abstract reason and social-contract rationalism. He downplayed or reinterpreted the more revolutionary, natural-rights, and Enlightenment elements of 1776 and 1787-1789 in favor of a story of prudent statesmen conserving an older order.
This intellectual move has been enormously influential on post-war American conservatism. It allows conservatives to do three things: (i.) claim the Founders as their own; (ii.) critique later liberal or progressive developments as departures from that tradition; and (iii.) import Counter-Enlightenment or traditionalist sensibilities (e.g., priority of concrete order, community, and authority over abstract procedure and individual rights) while still waving the constitutional flag.
When this reframing becomes dominant, defenders of “the Constitution and the Founders” sometimes operate with intellectual structures borrowed from thinkers who were explicitly hostile to the republican and Enlightenment premises of the American experiment, which was focused on limited government by consent, separation of powers as mechanism rather than organic hierarchy, reason and evidence as public standards.
DEFENDING THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION
A defense of the republican tradition requires fidelity to its actual historical character rather than selective myth-making. The American founding was a complex eclectic and pluralist synthesis, not a pure traditionalist restoration or a pure radical break.
It thus created a new constitutional order in 1787-1789 precisely because the Articles of Confederation had failed. The office of President under the Constitution was deliberately different from the presiding officers of the old Congress. These U.S. Founders were acutely aware they were engaged in an experiment in self-government that required both institutional design and civic virtue. They did not treat tradition as self-sufficient but used reason to construct mechanisms of checks and balances, federalism and a written constitution, that they hoped would channel human nature better than pure tradition or pure will.
When conservatism adopts Kirk-style reframing too thoroughly, or when media content pushes “the Constitution was never really legitimate” arguments, it erodes two things essential to republican self-government: (a) attachment to institutional continuity and procedural legitimacy and (b) commitment to reason and evidence as public standards. Republicanism historically depends on citizens accepting (even while criticizing) the rules and offices created by the constitutional settlement, rather than treating them as perpetually suspect or secondary to some deeper “real” order. The republican tradition from Machiavelli through the American Founders recognized that republics are fragile and require citizens capable of judging arguments on merits, not solely on mythic or traditional authority. Widespread comfort with “the official history is a lie” narratives weakens that capacity on all sides.
When political identities (left or right) borrow anti-republican intellectual structures, whether Counter-Enlightenment traditionalism, apocalyptic delegitimization, or strong-state solutions, they often do so while claiming to defend republicanism or rather “democracy” is the term used like the Wooden Horse of Odysseus. The result is not strengthened republicanism but its gradual hollowing out, replaced by personality, narrative, and the search for decisive authority that can cut through “corrupt” procedures.
A solid defense would treat the Founding as the complex, Enlightenment-influenced constitutional creation it was, which was an attempt to secure republican liberty through deliberate institutional design rather than through the restoration of older organic hierarchies or the rejection of rationalist politics. That framing is harder to weaponize for short-term mobilization, but it is more consistent with actually sustaining the foundational republican tradition over time.
I think however, these arguments by Eric Shawn for others serve to undermine the eclectic and pluralist roots I have covered in Freemasonry and the Making of American Pluralist Republicanism, that dismantles his and others’ attempts lately to solely and falsely ground the United States in a clear revisionist “Judeo-Christian” Zionist narrative that owes its civilization to Jews to justify the United Stated alliance with Israel. This is on the heel of Benjamin Netanyahu recently making remarks that stirred controversy by suggesting that the United States “would not exist without Jews.” He framed this as part of a broader defense of Israel during discussions about Gaza.
RECOMMENDED SOURCES
- U.S. House of Representatives, Official list of Presidents of the Continental Congress
- Mount Vernon (George Washington’s estate), Presidential Election of 1789
- National Archives, Constitution and ratification records