The wealth of the American Founders
A critical, progressive, and patriotic perspective
If we look at modern people’s revolutions of the Global South and East, we find that the nation-state is the terrain of struggle, and that said revolutions have struggled for people’s control of the structures of the nation-state. Moreover, as the revolutions sought through revolutionary ideological discourse to delegitimate the authority of the ruling elite, they proposed a project of alternative construction, putting forth alternative structures for representing the people and for making political decisions in the name of the people. In addition, even though they emerged from colonial, semi-colonial, and neocolonial situations that were characterized by unjust structures of various dimensions, they identified the structures and norms from the previous order that must be retained in the new order, because they provided economic, political, and philosophical advances, in spite of the dominating process through which they were imposed. On this foundation, they projected the construction of a future order through the transformation of the existing order.
The revolutionary processes took as given that objective reality functioned as a necessary check on their discourse. Although they formulated an alternative discourse, rooted in their perspective as colonized peoples, they assumed that credibility among their own people required a discourse that accurately explained and described historical and contemporary reality. They did not consider themselves free to construct post-modern national narratives.
In a classic work published in 1913, Charles Beard reported on his study of the economic backgrounds of the fifty-five men who drew up the U.S. Constitution at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, in which he found that most were wealthy landholders, slaveholders, and owners of manufacturing and commercial enterprises, and most lent money at interest. Therefore, Beard maintained, they had a direct economic interest in the ideas they espoused, such as protective tariffs for domestic manufacturing and opposition to the printing of paper money so that debtors could pay off debts at a lower real price.
Beard’s interpretation gave rise to a progressive school of thought in American historiography, which interpreted the constitution’s framers and defenders as being more interested in defending their elite interests than in defending republican principles, even though it was the latter that was central to the Constitution and to the Federalist essays that were written in its defense. Some historians in this progressive tendency interpreted the movement for the Constitution of 1787 as a counterrevolution directed against the more democratic concepts emerging from the socioeconomic sectors without property or with limited property.
These progressive tendencies influenced Howard Zinn, whose influential book, A People’s History of the United States, was initially published in 1980 and has gone through several updated editions. Zinn wrote: “When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.” He adds, “Charles Beard warned us that governments—including the government of the United States—are not neutral, that they represent the dominant economic interests, and that their constitutions are intended to serve their interests.”
In the formulation of this critique, the progressive school of historiography did not follow the example of the people’s revolutions of the Global South and East, in that the progressive attack on the legitimacy of the nation’s founding was not accompanied by a project of alternative construction. In addition, their critique was not an entirely accurate description of reality. Zinn’s account of the project to create a new Constitution in 1787 and 1788 reads like a retrospective selection that abstracts the written words of the framers: from the actual historical context in which the framers were struggling to create a republic; from the known understandings and interpretations of the English-speaking literary world of that time; and from the serious threats to the republican project that the American revolutionaries were experiencing under the failing project of the Articles of Confederation; all of which are addressed in the Federalist Papers.
The Federalist Papers gave voice to the concerns of the framers for the future viability of the nation under a republican form of government. The extensiveness of their expression and the credibility of their arguments make self-evident their sincerity, standing in contrast to the suggestion that they were constructing ideological legitimations for structures that they deceptively designed to protect their economic interests.
Preeminent among the issues of concern to the framers was the fact that the Articles of Confederation had established a central government that was too weak to act on its own behalf and was unable to regulate commerce or defend the nation against potential foreign threats in a complex world situation. They struggled with the question of how to strengthen the central government without creating structures that might evolve into tyrannical government. They had studied governments in the ancient world and in modern England and northwestern Europe, and they were aware that such questions had bedeviled republican governments, leaving them unable to sustain themselves as republican forms of government.
The central idea of the American Revolution of 1774 to 1787 was the necessity for modern political systems to move from monarchies to republican governments that are based in the power of the people. But the key dilemma is, once the people grant powers to govern in their name, what prevents the governors from expanding their power and becoming a new form of self-sustaining despotic and tyrannical government, where the rulers defend their own interests and seek to expand their own powers?
The response of the framers to this fundamental dilemma was to divide the governmental powers and to create an elaborate system of checks and balances within the government. The explanations of the framers of the rationale behind the divisions of power and the checks among them were detailed and very well thought out, and they should be much more studied today than they are, so that citizens will have a good and appreciative understanding of the reasoning behind the division of governmental powers and the checks that each governmental power encounters. As is known, these divisions of powers include the separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches; and the division of the legislative branch into the House of Representatives and the Senate; with each division having different forms of selecting officials, which itself reinforced the separation of powers. Moreover, the division of governmental powers includes the division between federal and state governments, with the intention that the states were to function as sovereign governments, except for those limited powers given to the federal government by the Constitution.
At the same time, the framers were concerned with the need to check the power of the people, because the people itself could become tyrannical, and it is this aspect which most provoked the progressive historians. The Constitution’s elaborate system of checks and balances served as a check on the people, the framers argued, making more difficult the quick implementation of unreasoned passions and whims among the people, and giving the political process more time for reasoned debate to emerge, so that the mature political will of the people would prevail over unreasoned passing whims, which sometimes were stoked by irresponsible social actors promoting their particular interests. Moreover, the elaborate system of checks and balances made more difficult the emergence of “majority factions,” which Madison defined as a majority sector of the population that is oppressing other sectors or that is acting in opposition to the long-term common good of the society.
Zinn views the preoccupation of the framers with Shays’ Rebellion of 1786 in Massachusetts as revealing the class interests of the framers. Zinn presents the issue as a conflict of interests between big property holders and indebted farmers, some of whom faced the loss of their land. Fair enough. But as Zinn himself points out, Shays’ Rebellion included the formation of armed militias that blocked the implementation of laws and intimidated justices and legislators, a decision-making process that in general is not highly recommended by the defenders of democracy. Moreover, Zinn notes that the principal demand of the rebellion was the emission of paper money by the legislature, as had been done in Rhode Island. More than a policy against the interests of wealthy moneylenders, the emission of paper money was a thoroughly bad idea, because it leads directly to inflation, thus adversely affecting all in the society who have no debts or a low level of debt. The issuance of paper money without backing is universally held today as a measure that is greatly damaging to the economy in the long run, even though it has immediate short-term benefits for some. One need not be a defender of the propertied class to view as reasonable the concern of the framers with respect to Shays’ Rebellion, with its problematic methods and bad proposal. For the framers, Shays’ Rebellion illustrated the inherent tendency of the people to follow passions instead of reasoned considerations, stoked by political actors whose comportment is not entirely virtuous. For the framers, the natural human tendency toward corruption and passion must be checked by the structures of the Constitution, which would provide opportunities for another natural human tendency, enlightened statesmanship, to express itself.
The insufficient protection of the socioeconomic rights of the people in the American Constitution was in part a consequence of the wealth of the Founders, but it also was a consequence of the fact that the question of socioeconomic rights was not on the table for discussion, except indirectly. This limitation, however, does not negate the achievements of the American Revolution, which include: the formulation of fundamental democratic principles in the Declaration of Independence, such as the equal rights of all; the establishment of a Constitution that protects political and civil rights, with a system of checks and balances designed to minimize possibilities for abuses of power; the creation of a federal system that divides the powers between federal and state governments, thus opening up many possibilities for local control; and the creation of a system of constitutional amendments, through which the overlooked socioeconomic rights, as well as other changes made necessary by economic developments, can be included. Far from delegitimating the American founding, the omission of socioeconomic rights simply illustrates and reaffirms the concept that modern people’s revolutions are ongoing evolutionary processes, in which later achievements are brought to fruition on the basis of the initial steps.
We have to keep in mind that the time of the framers was different from ours. They wrote and defended their proposed republican constitution in the context of the clear failure of the Articles of Confederation to secure a future republican order, known to the framers through direct experience; and in the context of the historic failures of republican governments in human history, known to the framers through their serious study of the English literary world of that time. They wrote and defended their proposal prior to the emergence of concentrated industry and the creation of an economic force that would be beyond the capacities of the government to adequately regulate; before the emergence of a progressive populist movement against the great trusts; before World War I cast aside Woodrow Wilson’s economic package, designed to regulate the new uncontrollable phenomenon of concentrated industry and banking; before the emergence of imperialism as the basis of foreign policy, seeking to establish and protect markets and natural resources of the large U.S. corporations in other lands; and before the emergence of the military-industry complex, which forged a permanent war economy, justified by Cold War ideological distortions. The framers could imagine none of these future developments, and they certainly were not trying to put forth proposals that would be beneficial to property holders in a future context that they could not imagine. They were defending the rights of property in their own context, and they understood, with good reason, that the protection of property rights in their context was beneficial for the long-term development of the society as a whole.
The fault with our current national maladies lies not with the Founders of the Republic, but with the New Left that emerged on the scene in the 1960s, riding the crest of a progressive ideological wave that was stimulated domestically by the civil rights/black power movement and the student anti-war movement, and internationally by the emergence of the Third World anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements. The New Left in the 1960s possessed key insights with respect to racism, poverty, and war, and the need to return power to the people. However, it failed to take subsequent necessary steps. The New Left could have turned beginning in the 1970s toward a politically mature proposal that recognized and embraced the achievements of the American Revolution, in defining fundamental democratic principals, in creating a political structure that protected the political and civil rights of all, and in establishing structures that enabled further progress through constitutional amendment. It could have recognized the significant gains in practice with respect to the political and civil rights of blacks and women, forged through use of constitutional amendments and corresponding congressional legislation. Most importantly, noting the example of the reform of the UN Charter via the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and drawing upon the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the period 1966 to 1968, the New Left could had proposed a series of new constitutional amendments that would define adequate housing, nutrition, health care, and educational opportunity as constitutional rights and that would establish non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations as a constitutional pillar of American foreign policy.
Instead, the progressive forces that had been set in motion evolved toward identity politics and to inaccurate exaggerations of the nation’s historic and contemporary social sins, converting the Left into a toxic and divisive force, incapable of unifying the nation toward the quest for further advances in the American Revolution. A force that had not observed the people’s revolutions of the Global South and East, and that therefore knew nothing of the need for alternative construction accompanying critique. In the process, it contributed to the deepening miseducation of the people, already confused with respect to the meaning of Marxism and socialism, as a legacy of the Cold War. In dividing the people, the woke Left became an ally of the corporate elite, stoking unreasoned passions and blocking the true political will of the people.
A progressive campaign beginning in the 1970s to advance the achievements of the American Revolution—through constitutional amendments that would protect socioeconomic rights and put the nation on a foundation of peace with other nations—would have been a politically viable proposal. In addition to coinciding with important tendencies in the African-American movement, it would have dovetailed with the experiences and consciousness of the white ethnic groups who migrated to the USA in great numbers from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and other nations of southern and eastern Europe during the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. These migrants found prejudice and discrimination in America, with pejorative views toward their languages, cultures, and religions. But at the same time, the immigrants of the era, as they learned and adopted American norms, experienced intergenerational upward mobility in a still expanding American economy. From their vantage point, America was a great land of freedom and opportunity. They would have enthusiastically welcomed in the 1970s a progressive formulation to advance the American Revolution to a new stage involving the protection of socioeconomic rights and a foreign policy based in peace and cooperation, advancing the cause not through violent confrontation in the streets, but through the road of constitutional amendments, supplemented by periodic peaceful and celebratory public assemblies. They would have been present in their local communities in all fifty states working toward the passage of constitutional amendments, in accordance with the procedures established by the framers of the constitution, adopting the Founding Fathers of the nation as their spiritual forefathers.
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