07/05/2026
I have thought much about writing on this Independence Day weekend, but I keep hesitating. Then I read this, from the unlikeliest of places. As a country, we are better than what we have been. We do not need to live in hate. We do not need to live in fear. We can welcome one another, in all our differences, in all our diversity. This is always what has made this country different. If there is greatness in our country, it is in embracing our differences. We have often fought against this. We have often failed to meet our better natures. But we keep trying.
On this, our 250th anniversary of a Declaration of Independence, let us words of founders, let us hold to these truths, “..that all men are created equal…”
CONFUCIUS AND THE FOUNDING FATHERS
I grew up on the block where the Lotus Fortune Cookie Factory operated. When I was a boy, my father asked the owner where he got his fortunes.
“Benjamin Franklin,” he replied.
That’s just one reason why I’ve grown up wondering howmuch cross-influence existed between American and Chinese thought.
An SCMP opinion piece takes Donald Trump’s remarks at a May 2026 Beijing state banquet—in which he cited Benjamin Franklin’s publication of Confucian sayings and Confucius’s presence on the Supreme Court building—to argue that Chinese philosophy played a genuine but underappreciated role in shaping both the European Enlightenment and America’s founding ideals.
The article points to the Supreme Court’s East Pediment, where Confucius stands alongside Moses and Solon as one of three foundational lawgivers. (In the photograph, Confucius is on the left.) The author contends that, while a direct causal link is impossible to prove definitively, the structural parallels between Confucian ethics and American revolutionary ideals are too striking to dismiss. But how true is that?
The article’s core factual claims hold up reasonably well, though with some nuance.
First, Franklin’s interest in Confucius began around 1726, when he read The Morals of Confucius in London, and within a decade he was printing Confucian ideas in the Pennsylvania Gazette, which he had purchased in 1729. The claim that he “published sayings of Confucius in his colonial newspaper” is therefore broadly accurate.
Second, the East Pediment was indeed designed by Cass Gilbert and sculpted by Hermon A. MacNeil. Gilbert worked closely with MacNeil from 1932 to 1934 in developing the allegorical figures. MacNeil explained that the three figures represented “three great civilizations” whose legal and ethical traditions contributed to the development of law. However, the article’s claim that Gilbert directed the sculpting “in the 1930s” is somewhat misleading. Gilbert died in 1934, a year before the building was completed, and the project was carried to completion by his son, Cass Gilbert Jr.
Third, the East Pediment is on the rear of the Supreme Court building, not its prominent front façade—a fact the article glosses over. The article’s claim that the Confucius statue sits “directly above the window of the chief justice’s office suite” is not corroborated by official sources.
The question of how much the Founders were actually influenced by Chinese thought, as opposed to merely being aware of it, deserves closer examination. Confucian texts circulated in the Anglophone world through Jesuit translations in the late seventeenth century, and Franklin’s engagement with them was genuine and well documented. But demonstrating strong intellectual influence requires a higher standard of evidence than readership or admiration alone.
The Founders’ primary philosophical debts—to Locke, Montesquieu, classical republicanism, and Protestant natural law traditions—are far more evident in their own writings and in the structure of the documents they produced. The more defensible claim is that the Enlightenment’s “Sinophilia,” especially in France among figures such as Voltaire and the Physiocrats, created an intellectual climate in which Chinese models of meritocratic governance and moral statecraft were discussed and sometimes idealized. That climate, in turn, formed part of the broader intellectual world in which the American Founders lived. To argue for a direct, transformative influence, however, requires leaping over the absence of explicit citations in the key founding documents themselves.
The Supreme Court carvings were selected in the 1930s by architects and sculptors working within the tradition of comparative jurisprudence.
Chinese philosophy was a genuine background presence in the intellectual world of the Founders, and it was meaningfully absorbed by figures such as Franklin. It was not, however, a primary source of American political thought in the way the article implies.
Even so, it was an influence. And it stands as a silent rebuke to those who reject diversity of thought. It is good that these figures are carved in stone. They remind us that America’s intellectual heritage is richer and more cosmopolitan than either enthusiasts or skeptics sometimes claim.
https://www.scmp.com/opinion/china-opinion/article/3358034/how-chinese-philosophy-influenced-us-founding-fathers
