Conventional wisdom maintains that US national and state governments unthinkingly adopted bicameral legislatures for their new governments because of their familiarity with, and affection for, the British model. Jeremy Bentham dismissed second chambers as due to prejudice, “authority-begotten and blind custom-begotten prejudice.”
Lewis Rockow mouthed conventional wisdom in a 1928 article in the American Political Science Review:
When the American colonies separated from England they followed the English example, for they recognized that the government of England, imperfect as it was, was nevertheless less predatory and oppressive than any other government. With the House of Lords they had no quarrel; their complaints were directed entirely against the monarchy; so they rejected the monarchy and retained a second chamber.
First, as a side note, while the Declaration of Independence aimed its indictment at the British Crown, the decades-long struggle of the colonists was with the Parliament regarding the nature of the great constitutional principle of 1688, parliamentary representation.
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