What did America's founding fathers think of socialism?

[Michael B]

They had no ideas about it.

Although various political movements and theories compatible with socialism had surfaced from the 5thC BC onwards (and notably in the 15thC and 17thC AD in England with groups like the Lollards and Levellers and in France during the Revolution), socialism as a developed ideology did not arrive until the first third of the 19thC.

America's founding fathers were in principle more concerned with individual self-realisation, and in practice most concerned of all with their bank-balances.

What would they have thought of it?

They would almost certainly have been horrified. They were all well-to-do planters and bourgeois. They planned the new nation as a constitutional monarchy with the president as the elected monarch and a whole array of checks and balances, with the obvious (and stated) aim of preserving their society and their property in the form it already had.

What they would have thought of a genuinely egalitarian programme is obvious. They did not even want to free the slaves.