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  3. It has been challenging for most twentieth-century American policy-makers to recapture the memory of the early United States, Co

It has been challenging for most twentieth-century American policy-makers to recapture the memory of the early United States, Co

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问题     It has been challenging for most twentieth-century American policy-makers to recapture the memory of the early United States, Constitution and all, as a revolutionary force—to ascertain, in other words, the original motives of our founding fathers. The argument that the war was a revolution is essentially universal among the progressives like Turner, Becket, and Jameson, who argue that the war was fought for, or at least caused, greater democracy in the colonies, and generally agree that the war was a true revolution, not simply a rejection of British tyranny.
    Though this may be true—wars do tend to terminate Old Orders and ancient regimes — it is hardly a singular observation regarding the American Revolution. A more salient hypothesis is that the fight for greater democracy spawned not so much from a desire for change as an affirmation of the existing order. Those gaining votes and other social privileges only wished to profit from the existing system—these were no sans culottes beheading kings and aristocrats as the Frenchmen did in their frenzied Terror and Englishmen who desired home governance, at first seeking to preserve local autonomy and loyalty to the King, not to Parliament.
    It was only after the initial conflict that the revolutionaries slipped into the position of demanding sovereignty. Classwise, those ruling in 1770 also held power in 1790, while the Parliament, a bicameral legislature, was replaced by the Congress, another bicameral legislature and the King supplanted by a President, who could very easily have maintained his position for life. This nearly created a tradition that the head-of-state-for-life would be chosen without the benefit of heredity, a disastrous case suffered by twentieth-century Ugandans under Idi Amin. Furthermore, only propertied white males had suffrage, both before and after the war, and the end of slavery was not exactly accelerated by the war, though there were a few relatively minor gains for blacks. Meanwhile, the economic system was not altered, nor was the class structure, except to forbid a nobility that in any case had only a nominal existence in the colonies before the war.
    What the colonists sought was control to which they had already been accustomed. Parliament was not in the colonists "chain of command" in 1700, and for the House of Commons to attempt to place itself there was seen as a loss to the colonists. Alteration was what they resisted, not what the sought;they largely felt that they were resisting an invasion of their political birthright, not that they were breaking bold new political ground, and therefore, it would be very convincing to argue that the war was fought as a reactionary response, not as a radical one.
According to the passage, the colonists who participated and supported the American Revolution initially did so
选项 A、with the goal of replacing a corrupt system of power with a more egalitarian one.
B、in order to preserve and retain the monarch’s powers, so that they would not be usurped by Parliament.
C、primarily in an effort to gain more votes from their dissatisfied political supporters.
D、with the foremost intent of achieving a greater level of profit from the system already in place.
答案D
解析 细节题。解题点在文章第二段。文章提出“Those gaining votes and other social privileges only wishedto profit from the existing system…”，说明他们为了期望从既有制度中获得特权，而不是A选项中的主张人人平等，不是B选项中的至上的王权，不是C选项中的获得来自政治不得意者的投票。因此，正确的选项是D。
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