Some available or slightly relevant books and references from the 1986 edition and the Forrest McDonald 1986 introduction

• Modern reprint: "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States" by Charles A. Beard, With a new Introduction by Forrest McDonald. The Free Press. 1986, ISBN 0-02-902480-3
  • Extract from the Introduction by Forrest McDonald: "It is difficult, in the present irreverent age, to understand the vehemence of the hostility with which An Economic Interpretation was greeted by many. Ex-president William Howard Taft, speaking at the Waldorf-Astoria before an audience of 1,100, which included governors, senators, and Supreme Court justices, lambasted "these God-forgetting Progressive days" for producing an associate professor at Columbia who dares to make a "muckraking investigation" that besmirched the cherished memory of the Founders. Former secretary of state Elihu Root expressed similar outrage. Future president Warren G. Harding, publisher of the Marion, Ohio, Star denounced Beard in a story whose headline read: SCAVENGERS, HYENA-LIKE, DESECRATE THE GRAVES OF THE DEAD PATRIOTS WE REVERE. The book, the story said, was filled with "filthy lies and rotten perversions"; it was "libelous, vicious, and damnable in its influence." A reviewer in The Nation called the book "a pioneer work" of "first-rate importance", but afterward the journal ran a scathing editorial denunciation of it. Nicholas Murrary Butler, president of Columbia, attacked the work of his faculty colleague for charging the Framers with writing the Constitution to satisfy their "economic appetites" - which Beard had not actually done - and suggested that Beard, in assigning unworthy motives to the Framers, revealed that he himself would have acted unworthily in similar circumstances. In Seattle, Washington, Beard's book was banned from the public schools and placed on "closed and restricted reserve" in the public library."

• David Hume's "Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary"; vols 3 and 5 of David Hume: The Philosophical Works, Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose, eds. (4 vols. photocopy reprint of the 1882 London edition, 1964)

• Douglas Adair, "That Politics May be Reduced to a Science: David Hume, James Madison, and the Tenth Federalist", in Huntington Library Quarterly, 20:343-360 (1957)

• Forrest McDonald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, Ill., 1958), passim.

• Forrest McDonald, E. Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the American Republic, 1776-1790 (Boston, Mass., 1965; republished Indianapolis, Ind., 1979)

Rarely used word "Personalty" (and the rarer used definition of personality) - the private property/personal belongings of a person - the word is used in this context in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States" by Charles A. Beard (First Published 1913)

From the Oxford Dictionary

personalty: a. See quots. 1607, 1888. b. Personal goods, personal estate: see PERSONAL A. 6; also gen. personal belongings. c. = PERSONALITY 6c. rare.

a1481 LITTLETON Tenures §315 III. iv. (1516) Dvb, Pur ceo qe laccion est en le personalte & nemye en le realte. 1544 translation, Bycause that the accyon is in the parsonalte and nat in the realte. 1607 COWELL Interpr., Personalty (Personalitas), is an abstract of personall. The action is in the personalty,..that is to say, brought against the right person, or the person against whome in lawe it lieth. 1766 BLACKSTONE Comm. II. xxiv. 385 Our courts now regard a man's personalty in a light nearly, if not quite, equal to his realty: and have adopted a more enlarged and less technical mode of considering the one than the other. 1827 JARMAN J. J. Powell's Devises (ed. 3) II. 163 The intention to confine the word ‘estate’ to personalty was inferred by the subsequent specification. 1845 STEPHEN Comm. Laws Eng. (1874) I. 167 Things personal, (otherwise called personalty,) consist of goods, money, and all other moveables, and of such rights and profits as relate to moveables. 1865 Look Before You Leap I. 12 His gay jacket, his horses, and a few personalties. 1880 GLADSTONE Speech 15 Mar., You will find that the duties on personalties of half a million or one million are comparatively insignificant; and so it is in regard to rates. 1888 T. C. WILLIAMS in Law Quarterly Rev. IV. 405 Actions were said to be or to sound in the realty or in the personalty, according to the nature of the relief afforded therein. Next the terms, the realty, the personalty were applied to the things recoverable in real or personal actions respectively. Such things were then distinguished as real or personal things.

personality: Law. a. = PERSONALTY a. Obs. b. = PERSONALTY b; gen. personal belongings. rare.

1658 PHILLIPS, Personality, (a Law-Term) an abstract of personal, as the action is in the personalty [1661 BLOUNT personality; 1704 J. HARRIS Lex. Techn. I, Personality]; that is, brought against the right person. 1752 DODSON in Phil. Trans. XLVII. 334 The interest or dividends of many personalities in the stocks. 1858 HAWTHORNE Fr. and It. Note-Bks. II. 72 Michael Angelo's..old slippers, and whatever other of his closest personalities are to be shown.

Extracts refering to Charles Beard from "Historical Fallacies - Toward a Logic of Historical Thought" by David Hackett Fischer, Harper Torchbooks, 1970, ISBN: 0-6-131545-1

The "furtive fallacy" - Charles Beard and An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution : Pages 74 to 77 - "Historical Fallacies - Toward a Logic of Historical Thought" by David Hackett Fischer, Harper Torchbooks, 1970, ISBN: 0-6-131545-1

"The furtive fallacy is the erroneous idea that facts of special significance are dark and dirty things and that history itself is a story of causes mostly insidious and results mostly invidious. It begins with the premise that reality is a sordid, secret thing; and that history happens on the back stairs a little after midnight, or else in a smoke-filled form, or a perfumed boudoir, or an executive penthouse or somewhere in the inner sanctum of the Vatican, or the Kremlin, or the Reich Chancellery, or the Pentagon. It is something more, and something other than a conspiracy theory . . "

[TEXT DELETED]

"Historians in the Progressive era showed the same habit of thought. A socialist scholar, Algie Simons, led the pack in their reinterpretations of that sacred ark of republicanism, the United States Constitution (30. Algie M. Simons, Social Forces in American History New York, 1911). In rhetoric which "sweats with rural superstition," he informed his readers that "the organic law of this nation was formulated in secret session by a body called into existence through a conspiratory [sic] trick, and was forced upon a disfranchised people by means of dishonest apportionment in order that the interests of a small body of wealthy rulers might be served."

Close behing Simons was the mightiest muckraker of them all, Charles Beard, author of the most famous monograph in American History, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (New York, 1913), in which the furtive fallacy was deeply embedded. Beard claimed otherwise, and several times insisted that his thesis was misunderstood. But in fact it was misconceived. For Beard, as for Simons, the Constitution was "essentially an economic document," which was "written by a small and active group of men" who were "with a few exceptions, immediately, directly and personally interested in, and derived economic advantages from, the establishment of the new system."

Beard's book, for all the controversy which it caused, was a very moderate specimen of the furtive falacy. No imputations of paranoia can attach to this work. Nobody, not even his worst critics, wished to call a psychiatrist (though President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia may have wished to call the police). But his interpretative model, in the events which it made significant, was false and misleading."

The "fallacy of argument ad temperantiam" - Charles Beard and An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution : Pages 296 to 297 - "Historical Fallacies - Toward a Logic of Historical Thought" by David Hackett Fischer, Harper Torchbooks, 1970, ISBN: 0-6-131545-1

"The fallacy of argument ad temperantiam is an appeal to moderation, on the apparent assujmption that truth, in Burke's phrase is always a "sort of middle." In academic scholarship it commonly occurs in two forms. The first is stylistic; the second, substantive."

[TEXT DELETED]

"Historians write dull books not because they are dull fellows, but because they have formed the stupid habit of confusing dullness with detachment. A clear example of an excess of stylistic moderation is the good, grey, Cambridge HIstory of British Foreign Policy, or the Cambridge Modern History. An editor of these excruciating works, the English diplomatic historian A. W. Ward, is alleged to have revised one chapter on the ground that "It's a bit lively." (S.C. Roberts, Adventures with Authors (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 112-13, quoted in G.R. Elton, The Practise of History (New York, 1967), p. 108.)

An exceedingly lively American scholar, Charles A. Beard, may have operated upon the same assumption in his most important work, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. Several scholars have pondered an odd fact about the work. Eric Goldman observes, For a man like Charles Beard, who could write with either a shillelagh or a stiletto, the Economic Interpretation was a triumph in dullness. Not a single departure from catalogue organization, not a single bright sentence, enlivened the book, which carefully described itself as an "arid survey." Max Lerner, who believes that the Economic Interpretation influenced his own thinking enormously, has described the volume's strategy of flatness. "Beard must have had a premonition of the desparate resistance he would run into," Lerner commented. " . . . It is almost as if the author had set out with a deliberate severity to strip the book of every adornment, on the theory that a plain woman would be less suspected of being a wanton than an attractive one." (Eric Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny (New York, 1952), p. 153.)

If liveliness is thought to be unbecoming in a monograph, enthusiasm appears to be unforgivable. One of Beard's most outspoken critics, Robert Brown, failed to bend before his colleagues' bias toward moderation and published several volumes in a spirit of furious revisionism which are sometimes condemned not for their substance but for their style. A conservative scholar has written, "What mars Professor Brown's important contributions to our understanding of the late colonial period is a certain belligerence toward fellow workings in this field." I hold no brief for Brown, who does indeed make himself more than a little disagreeable by a strident, self-righteous style. But that aspect of this work has nothing whatever to do with its interpretative merit."

The "fallacy of counterquestions" - Charles Beard and An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution vs Forrest McDonald's "We the People" : Pages 296 to 297 - "Historical Fallacies - Toward a Logic of Historical Thought" by David Hackett Fischer, Harper Torchbooks, 1970, ISBN: 0-6-131545-1

"The fallacy of counterquestions is an attempt at a revision which becomes merely a mindless inversion of an earlier interpretation and a reiteration of its fundamental assumptions. It has been said that there are two ways of manifesting an intellectual subservience to another mind: slavish imitation and obsessive refutation. Both of these forms of servility are regrettably common in historical scholarship. As revisionism grows more respectable, and even a prerequisite to a professional career, an increasing number of historians are delivered into the latter form of bondage."

[TEXT DELETED]

"A debate between two raving lunatics is unlikely to issue in a triumph of reason. An argument between two pathological liars is an improbably path to the truth. An exchange between two fools can scarcely be expected to end in a victory for wisdom. Adversary methods may, perhaps, be appropriate to a courtroom, where the object is the attainment of justice, but they are inappropriate to a seminar room, where the purpose is the refinement of truth. A fight between wild-eyed exponents of X and Y will help not all if Z was in fact the case, as it usually is. And between X and not-X the difference is merely a cipher, a nullity, a zero.

But there is something more specifically deficient about a counterquestion. If the original question, which is under attack, is mistaken, then its basic assumptions are probably faulty. But a counterquestion, in its reflexive inversion of the original, tends to repeat the original assumptions, faults and all, and thereby to perpetutate the error. Counter-revision is objectionable not because it is revisionist but because its revisionism is incomplete and superficial.

Consider for example, the case of Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York, 1913), and his most determined critic, Forrest McDonald. McDonald has published two anti-Beardian books on the constitution: We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution and E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the American Republic, 1776-1790 (Boston, 1965). The first colume is an elaborate refutation of Beard's interpretation; the second, a more positive statement of McDonald's views."

[TEXT DELETED]

That strategy was doubly dysfunctional to McDonald's unquiry. First, it diverted his attention from the critical problem of logical and epistemological and metaphysical devidiencies in the Beardian model. Second, when McDonald came to tell his own story of the Constitution the materials at hand were dictated by Beardian assumptions. The result, in E Pluribus Unum, was that McDonald, in the words of one reviewer, followed "a fairly Beardian line in interpreting the movement for the Constitution. Except for a few special twists of his own, the general outline follows the economic determinist pattern: failure of the impost ammedment of 1786, paper money, Rhode Island, Shay's Rebellion, conservative reaction, etc" (E. James Ferguson in The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 23 (1966): 149.)"

[TEXT DELETED]

"There is at least one important way in which McDonald departs from the Beardian model. He qualifies his account of the greed of the founding fathers by giving some attention to gluttony and lust. Beard delicately confined his investigation to pocketbooks; McDonald also inspected the stomachs, glands, and genitals of the Founding Fathers. But like Beard, McDonald tended to forget that men have minds and hearts, and feet to stand on and spines to stand straight. In this respect McDonald became more Beardian than Beard."

Life and some quotes of Charles A. Beard

• "An economic interpretation of the constitution of the United States" by Charles A. Beard (published 1913)
  • Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948): http://www.netrax.net/~rarebook/s981120.htm

    Beard was born in Knightstown, Indiana. He studied at DePauw University, Oxford, and Columbia, where he taught from 1907; resigning in 1917 on an issue of academic freedom in wartime.
    After working for some years on European history, he turned his attention to America and produced this 'Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States'. It is his best known and most significant work. He argues here that personal and communal economic interests were the main engine for the framing of the U.S. Constitution. In subsequent years, his interpretation became axiomatic, but at the time, it was nothing short of revolutionary. It was the first salvo in demolishing a wall of patriotic historiography that held the Constitution to be the result of unselfish labor by giants of a 'Golden Age'.
    

    Charles Beard (who with his wife Mary wrote several large and important general histories) was asked by a publisher if he could write a book on the lessons of history. He said that he could do it in four sentences:

    
    1. Whom the Gods would destroy; they first make made with power.
    2. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
    3. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
    4. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Another summary and effects of "An economic interpretation of the constitution"

• "An economic interpretation of the constitution of the United States": http://www.liberty-tree.org/ltn/economic-constitution.html

  "First published in 1913, this iconoclastic masterpiece sparked a lively scholarly debate that has not yet fully subsided. Beard's then-radical thesis was that the business and property interests of the Founding Fathers---not notions of liberty and freedom---were the biggest factors in shaping the U.S. Constitution. For example, Beard concluded that speculation in depreciated certificates of Revolutionary War debt were an extremely dynamic element in bringing about the establishment of the Constitution. Such analysis was a dramatic break from the uncritical reverence previously given to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, and sparked a revolution of its own in historical scholarship. While more recent research has undermined many of Beard's conclusions, this book remains as thought-provoking and intellectually challenging as when it was first published. Noted historian Forrest McDonald has contributed an introduction to this new edition that tells how Beard's work affected historians and summarizes later research that questions Beard's conclusions. No serious student of the U.S. Constitution can afford to be without this major work!"

Extract of a summary including a mention of Beard's book

• "The Constitution For The United States Its Sources and Its Application": http://www.nidlink.com/~bobhard/consti15.html

• "The Convention was singularly lacking in doctrinaires, in idealists. Jefferson, the great idealist and humanitarian of the epoch, was in France as the official representative of the government. It was also lacking in a spirit of inquiry. One would naturally think that a body of men engaged in a constructive work of such immense possibilities would summon before them, day after day, citizens of all degrees and from all sections, in an effort to find out what was wrong and what was required to set it right. But they did not do this; they never summoned anybody. To have done so might have revealed the purport of the Convention, and they could not risk that contingency. The Constitution was planned like a coup d'etat; and that was its effect, in truth."

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States - By Charles A. Beard - Review by Serdar Goz

• http://web.syr.edu/~ssgoz/review1.htm

• "What comes to the minds of most people when they think of the constitutional convention is a gathering of scholarly gentlemen who sought to create a government that was for the people and by the people. In all facets of the documents this holds true. Nowhere in the Constitution are there rules that protect any one class in its rights or property over any other. The Constitution does not distinguish differences by descent, opinion, religion, or property. In these respects the founding fathers have much credit owed to them. In An Economic interpretation of the Constitution of the United States Charles Beard refutes this perception of the founding fathers. “The whole theory of the economic interpretation of history,” Beard states, “rests upon the concept that social progress in general is the result of contending interests in society…”(p.19). By researching the classes and social groups that existed at the time previous to the adoption of the Constitution those who would have most immediately gained and benefited by the overthrow of the old system and adoption of the new system would be made clear. Beard goes methodically through who was in the convention and the person’s financial standing, the states involved in the ratification and where her finances were found."

• "Although personalty in the form of money in interest or investment capitol doesn’t come close to what it does today nonetheless it played a role in the politics at the convention. Money capitol was suffering in two ways under the Articles of Confederation. It was difficult to invest money because of the lack of protection for manufacturers, there was an absence of protection for investments in western lands and there existed discrimination against American shipping by foreign countries. Personalty in money was also in dire straights because of the makers of paper money. There were stay laws, pine barren acts, and other mechanisms to depreciate the value of money or to delay the collection of debts. Furthermore, each state had its own form of currency and coinage making it difficult to conduct business across borders. This situation greatly favored debtors, possibly driving creditors into class-consciousness and seeking a means to an end at the convention according to Beard.

  Those who were holders of personalty in public securities were greatly concerned with the establishment of a national government. Under the Articles of Confederation the government was not paying the interest on its debts and its paper money had depreciated to the point it was selling at one-sixth to one-twentieth its par value as Beard put forth. State money was also at a low price because of the reservations people had of the actions of state legislatures. The advantages of a strong national government that would be able to pay off its debts at face value, coin its own money and maintain its worth is obvious. "

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States - By Charles A. Beard - An Article Review by Margaret Hancock Johnson

• http://www.tamucc.edu/~whatley/PADM5302/theo38c.htm

• "To understand the origins of the writing of the United States Constitution an examination of the men, their place in society, their wealth and political power should be examined. Also, it would be most beneficial to examine rest of society who had no say in its formulation and those who opposed its proposed legislation. It is important to assume, according to Beard, that there were a certain number of men who were in favor of the creation of the Constitution and a certain number of men were against its creation. Beard attempts to search for and or explain the economic biographies of the men who wrote and implemented this document and show that they had the power to choose legislation which would benefit their economic class.

  Beard states that if all the merchants, lenders, security holders, manufacturers, shippers, capitalists, financiers and their professional associates were on one side in support of the Constitution and substantially all or the major proportion of the opposition came from the non-slave holding farmers and debtors would it be not conclusive that our fundamental law was not a product of an abstraction known as the whole people. His point is that the Constitution may not have been written from a standpoint which would promote the general welfare of the entire people of the country, but would first promote the economic advantages for the people in power. "

• "Beard examines the Americans who had no say in the Constitution. The amount of citizens who could not vote or participate in its formation is immense. These people were women, slaves, indented servants, the mass of men who could not qualify for voting under the property tests imposed by state constitutions and laws. The working class had almost no say in the adoption of the Constitution and the leaders did not appear to show interest in sharing that power. Hamilton, in a report concerning manufactures, writes that introducing machinery will provide employment to people who are otherwise idle, he said women and children in Europe are four-sevenths of this workforce. He continues to say that this income is to accrue principally to the fathers of families and remarks that the Ahusband himself experiences a new source of profit and support from the increased industry of his wife and daughters, invited and stimulated by the demands of the neighboring manufactories. This statement gives a true sense of the patriarchal power and attitude of the time. "

Charles Beard and Mary Ritter Beard

• Charles Beard: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAbeardC.htm

• "A Quaker, Beard was involved in the campaign to keep the United States out of the First World War. In 1917 he resigned from Columbia University in protest against the Espionage Act. "

• "Beard was never able to secure an academic appointment again and was forced to live off his writings and a diary farm he owned in Connecticut. Working with his wife, Mary Ritter Beard, he wrote a two volume history of the United States, The Rise of American Civilization (1927). This was followed by America in Midpassage (1939) and The American Spirit (1942). The couple also collaborated on A Basic History of the United States (1944)"

• "Although a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, he was very critical of his foreign policy. This was reflected in his books, American Foreign Policy in the Making: 1932-1940 (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of War (1948). Charles Beard died in New Haven, Connecticut, on 1st September, 1948"

• Mary Ritter Beard: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAWritter.htm

• "Mary and Charles Beard were proponents of what became known as the New History. They challenged the primacy of military and political explanations of the past by examining economic and social factors in more detail. In Beard's books she demonstrated the central role that women had played in history. This was reflected in her book On Understanding Women (1931) and America Through Women's Eyes (1933), a collection of accounts by women who had played an integral part in the development of America's history.

  In On Understanding Women she highlighted a problem that faced feminist historians. "Women have been engaged in a continuous contest to defend their arts and crafts, to win the right to use their minds and to train them, to obtain openings for their talents and to earn a livelihood, to break through legal restraints on their unfolding powers. In their quest for rights women have naturally placed emphasis on their wrongs, rather than their achievements and possessions, and have retold history as a story of their long Martyrdom. Feminists have been prone to prize and assume the traditions of those with whom they had waged such a long, and in places bitter conflict. In doing so, they have participated in a distortion of history and a disturbance of the balanced conceptual thought which gives harmony and power to life."

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States - By Charles A. Beard - People's Awareness Coalition

• http://www.pacinlaw.org/inside/interpretation.htm

  "This classic suggests that the U.S. Constitution was written by the country's monied classes and largely serves their interests. It remains an important work not merely for its historical data but because it raises the question of whether representatives need to reflect the class backgrounds of their constituents to represent their interests.

  Beard is the first to compare the economic backgrounds of elites with their mass counterparts. He argues that the framers of the Constitution were exclusively "merchants, money managers, security holders, manufacturers, shippers, capitalists, financiers, and their professional associates." Not represented were the small farming classes and the population of debtors.

  Furthermore, Beard claims that the framers of the Constitution were conscious of their economic self-interests; the Federalists presented an economic interpretation of politics to defend their work. Their main concerns, according to Beard, were to provide a strong central government and banking system and to protect the propertied classes from tyranny by the majority, by which they meant the poor taking from the rich"

• "In reading the pages of this remarkable work as a study in political economy, it is important to bear in mind that the system, which the authors are describing, consisted of two fundamental parts-one positive, the other negative:

  I. A government endowed with certain positive powers, but so constructed as to break the force of majority rule and prevent invasions of the property rights of minorities.

  II. Restrictions on the state legislatures which had been so vigorous in their attacks on capital."

• "Conclusions

  At the close of this long and arid survey-partaking of the nature of catalogue-it seems worth while to bring together the important conclusions for political science which the data presented appear to warrant.

  The movement for the Constitution of the United States was originated and carried through principally by four groups of personalty interests which had been adversely affected under the Articles of Confederation: money, public securities, manufactures, and trade and shipping.

  The first firm steps toward the formation of the Constitution were taken by a small and active group of men immediately interested through their personal possessions in the outcome of their labors.

  No popular vote was taken directly or indirectly on the proposition to call the Convention which drafted the Constitution.

  A large property-less mass was, under the prevailing suffrage qualifications, excluded at the outset from participation (through representatives) in the work of framing the Constitution.

  The members of the Philadelphia Convention which drafted the Constitution were, with a few exceptions, immediately, directly, and personally interested in, and derived economic advantages from, the establishment of the new system.

  The Constitution was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.

  The major portion of the members of the Convention are on record as recognizing the claim of property to a special and defensive position in the Constitution.

  In the ratification of the Constitution, about three-fourths of the adult males failed to vote on the question, having abstained from the elections at which delegates to the state conventions were chosen, either on account of their indifference or their disfranchisement by property qualifications.

  The Constitution was ratified by a vote of probably not more than one-sixth of the adult males.

  It is questionable whether a majority of the voters participating in the elections for the state conventions in New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, and South Carolina, actually approved the ratification of the Constitution.

  The leaders who supported the Constitution in the ratifying convention represented the same economic groups as the members of the Philadelphia Convention; and in a large number of instances they were also directly and personally interested in the outcome of their efforts.

  In the ratification, it became manifest that the line of cleavage for and against the Constitution was between substantial personalty interests on the one hand and the small farming and debtor interests on the other.

  The Constitution was not created by "the whole people" as the jurists have said; neither was it created by "the states" as Southern nullifiers long contended; but it was the work of a consolidated group whose interests knew no state boundaries and were truly national in their scope. [emphasis added]"

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)

• In the 1935 introduction to "An economic interpretation of the constitution of the United States", Charles Beard makes the following comment:

  "Few took the position occupied by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who once remarked to me that he had not got exicted about the book, like some of his colleagues, but had supposed that it was intended to throw light on the nature of the Constitution, and, in his opinion, did so in fact."

• Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) by Judge Mark P. Painter : http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/B/oliver/oliverxx.htm

• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was born in Boston on March 8, 1841. He would live until two days short of his 94th birthday. His father, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., was a physician, a professor of medicine at Harvard, and an author of novels, verse, and humorous essays. Thus, Holmes grew up in a literary, and prosperous, family.
  Holmes attended private schools in Boston and then, like his father, Harvard. Young Holmes was not overly impressed with the Harvard of that time, finding the curriculum stultifying (Henry Adams later remarked that "Harvard taught little, and that little ill."). He exercised his literary talents as editor of the Harvard Magazine, and in numerous essays. His graduation was even in some doubt, as he had been publicly admonished by the faculty for "disrespect" towards a professor. Holmes evidently took this as an affront and left to train for the Civil War. His unit was not immediately sent to the front, and Holmes was persuaded to return and receive his degree.
  After graduating from Harvard, Holmes began his Civil War service. He was wounded in battle three times and also suffered numerous illnesses. Though he was later to glorify wartime service, he declined to renew his term of service when it expired. Holmes apparently, and justifiably, felt that he had done more than his duty, and had survived one battle too many to continue tempting fate.
• Holmes's most famous work, The Common Law, published in 1881 grew out of a series of twelve lectures he was invited to deliver, which required that he explain the fundamentals of American law. Holmes questioned the historical underpinnings of much of Anglo-American jurisprudence. The work contains Holmes's most famous quote, "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." Holmes had come to believe that even outdated and seemingly illogical legal doctrines survived because they found new utility. Old legal forms were adapted to new societal conditions.
• Holmes's legal philosophy evolved over the sixty-odd years he wrote on the law. At first, he attempted a rational, systematic, or "scientific" conceptualization. But over time, he came to realize that the law was more of a compendium of decisions reflecting individual judges' resolutions of actual cases. Thus, the growth of the law was by experience molded to actual controversies in the society of the day.
• Widely considered a "liberal" because he believed in free speech and the right of labor to organize, Holmes was very conservative in his response to injury cases. He was a champion of "judicial restraint"-deferring to the judgment of the legislature in most matters of policy.
  Holmes is considered one of the giants of American law. Not just because he wrote so well, but also because he wrote so much, and for so long. A lawyer seeking a quote from Holmes is never left wanting. Even the Internal Revenue Service building in Washington, D.C. bears his writing, "Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society."

Review of Economic Interpretation of the Constitution

• http://www.pacinlaw.org/inside/interpretation.htm

• Major Themes

  This classic suggests that the U.S. Constitution was written by the country's monied classes and largely serves their interests. It remains an important work not merely for its historical data but because it raises the question of whether representatives need to reflect the class backgrounds of their constituents to represent their interests.

  Beard is the first to compare the economic backgrounds of elites with their mass counterparts. He argues that the framers of the Constitution were exclusively "merchants, money managers, security holders, manufacturers, shippers, capitalists, financiers, and their professional associates." Not represented were the small farming classes and the population of debtors.

  Furthermore, Beard claims that the framers of the Constitution were conscious of their economic self-interests; the Federalists presented an economic interpretation of politics to defend their work. Their main concerns, according to Beard, were to provide a strong central government and banking system and to protect the propertied classes from tyranny by the majority, by which they meant the poor taking from the rich.

  Key Points

  All the features of the Constitution can be traced back to the economic interests of those who wrote it. Checks and balances were to make the government difficult to take control of, so that small farmers and debtors could not use the government easily for their own advantage. The bicameral legislature, although partly a compromise between large and small states, also was intended to make it difficult for a single interest to galvanize the legislative branch.

  Opposition to the Constitution came almost exclusively from the small farmer classes.

  The Constitution was never truly or legally adopted. No popular vote was taken on the proposition to call the convention that drafted the Constitution.

  Complicated government benefits powerful special interests. The latter can afford lobbyists and lawyers to manipulate the legislative machinery. The large mass without property is politically powerless.

  The Constitution is not a compromise between states. It is the work of a "consolidated group whose interests knew no state boundaries and were truly national in their scope."

Review of Economic Interpretation of the Constitution

• http://www.tamucc.edu/~whatley/PADM5302/theo38c.htm

• Beard states that if all the merchants, lenders, security holders, manufacturers, shippers, capitalists, financiers and their professional associates were on one side in support of the Constitution and substantially all or the major proportion of the opposition came from the non-slave holding farmers and debtors would it be not conclusive that our fundamental law was not a product of an abstraction known as the whole people. His point is that the Constitution may not have been written from a standpoint which would promote the general welfare of the entire people of the country, but would first promote the economic advantages for the people in power.

• Beard examines the Americans who had no say in the Constitution. The amount of citizens who could not vote or participate in its formation is immense. These people were women, slaves, indented servants, the mass of men who could not qualify for voting under the property tests imposed by state constitutions and laws. The working class had almost no say in the adoption of the Constitution and the leaders did not appear to show interest in sharing that power. Hamilton, in a report concerning manufactures, writes that introducing machinery will provide employment to people who are otherwise idle, he said women and children in Europe are four-sevenths of this workforce. He continues to say that this income is to accrue principally to the fathers of families and remarks that the Ahusband himself experiences a new source of profit and support from the increased industry of his wife and daughters, invited and stimulated by the demands of the neighboring manufactories. This statement gives a true sense of the patriarchal power and attitude of the time.

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States - Charles Beard - 1913

• http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/index.asp?document=71

• [The principle of majority rule was not recognized in the founding. - TGW]

  We forget that when our government was established the principle of majority rule was nowhere to recognized - that until well along in the nineteenth century the majority of our forefathers did not even have the right to vote. . . . . Then a great popular movement swept over the country, and in the political upheaval which followed, the masses secured the right of suffrage.

  [From Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913); reprint, New York: Free Press, 1941), 324.]

• Vindicating the Founders : http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/

• Vindicating the Founders is a defense of the Founders' views and actions on slavery, women's rights, property rights, voting rights, and other controversial issues.

  The main purpose of this site is to make available to the public an extensive collection of original historical documents on the themes of this book. These documents provide evidence from original sources in support of the book's arguments.

  Most of the historical documents are quite short. Some are appropriate for in-class teacher handouts. All can be read quickly by students.

• The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People - Woodrow Wilson - 1912 : http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/index.asp?document=48

• We used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple that all that government had to do was to put on a policeman’s uniform, and say, "Now don’t anybody hurt anybody else." We used to say that the ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with, except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the best government was the government that did as little governing as possible. That was the idea that obtained in Jefferson’s time. But we are coming now to realize that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old conditions, and that the law has to step in and create new conditions under which we may live, the conditions which will make it tolerable for us to live.

  Let me illustrate what I mean: It used to be true in our cities that every family occupied a separate house of its own, that every family had its own little premises, that every family was separated in its life from every other family. That is no longer the case in our great cities. Families live in tenements, they live in flats, they live on floors; they are piled layer upon layer in the great tenement houses of our crowded districts, and not only are they piled layer upon layer, but they are associated room by room, so that there is in every room, sometimes, in our congested districts, a separate family. In some foreign countries they have made much more progress than we in handling these things. In the city of Glasgow, for example (Glasgow is one of the model cities of the world), they have made up their minds that the entries and the hallways of great tenements are public streets. Therefore, the policeman goes up the stairway, and patrols the corridors; the lighting department of the city sees to it that the halls are abundantly lighted. The city does not deceive itself into supposing that great building is a unit from which the police are to keep out and the civic authority to be excluded, but it says: "These are public highways, and light is needed in them, and control by the authority of the city."

  I liken that to our great modern industrial enterprises. A corporation is very like a large tenement house; it isn’t the premises of a single commercial family; it is just as much a public affair as a tenement house is a network of public highways….

• I believe, for one, that you cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil which is not native to it. I believe that the ancient traditions of a people are its ballast; you cannot make a tabula rasa upon which to write a political program. You cannot take a new sheet of paper and determine what your life shall be to-morrow. You must knit the new into the old. You cannot put a new patch on an old garment without ruining it; it must be not a patch, but something woven into the old fabric, of practically the same pattern, of the same texture and intention. If I did not believe that to be progressive was to preserve the essentials of our institutions, I for one could not be a progressive.

• Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian Theory. You have only to read the papers of The Federalist to see that fact written on every page. They speak of the "checks and balances" of the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system,—how by the attraction of gravitation the various parts are held in their orbits; and then they proceeded to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and the President as a sort of imitation of the solar system.

  They were only following the English Whigs, who gave Great Britain its modern constitution. Not that those Englishmen analyzed the matter, or had any theory about it; Englishmen care little for theories. It was a Frenchman, Montesquieu, who pointed out to them how faithfully they had copied Newton’s description of the mechanism of the heavens.

  The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way,—the best way of their age,—those fathers of the nation. Jefferson wrote of "the laws of Nature,"—and then by way of afterthought,—"and of Nature’s God." And they constructed a government as they would have constructed an orrery,—to display the laws of nature. Politics in their thought was a variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of "checks and balances."

  The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact, whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop.

  All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when "development," "evolution," is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.

  Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776. Their bosoms swell against George III, but they have no consciousness of the war for freedom that is going on to-day.

  The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day. It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstancs of the day in which it was conceived and written. It is an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action. Unless we can translate it into the questions of our own day, we are not worthy of it, we are not the sons of the sires who acted in response to its challenge.

  What form does the contest between tyranny and freedom take to-day? What is the special form of tyranny we now fight? How does it endanger the rights of the people, and what do we mean to do in order to make our contest against it effectual? What are to be the items of our new declaration of independence?

  By tyranny, as we now fight it, we mean control of the law, of legislation and adjudication, by organizations which do not represent the people, by means which are private and selfish. We mean, specifically, the conduct of our affairs and the shaping of our legislation in the interest of special bodies of capital and those who organize their use. We mean the alliance, for this purpose, of political machines with selfish business. We mean the exploitation of the people by legal and political means. We have seen many of our governments under these influences cease to be representative governments, cease to be governments representative of the people, and become governments representative of special interests, controlled by machines, which in their turn are not controlled by the people.

  Sometimes, when I think of the growth of our economic system, it seems to me as if, leaving our law just about where it was before any of the modern inventions or developments took place, we had simply at haphazard extended the family residence, added an office here and a workroom there, and a new set of sleeping rooms there, built up higher on our foundations, and put out little lean-tos on the side, until we have a structure that has no character whatever. Now, the problem is to continue to live in the house and yet change it.

• Well, we have started now at all events. The procession is under way. The stand-patter doesn’t know there is a procession. He is asleep in the back part of his house. He doesn’t know that the road is resounding with the tramp of men going to the front. And when he wakes up, the country will be empty. He will be deserted, and he will wonder what has happened. Nothing has happened. The world has been going on. The world has a habit of going on. The world has a habit of leaving those behind who won’t go with it. The world has always neglected stand-patters. And, therefore, the stand-patter does not excite my indignation; he excites my sympathy. He is going to be so lonely before it is all over. And we are good fellows, we are good company; why doesn’t he come along? We are not going to do him any harm. We are going to show him a good time. We are going to climb the slow road until it reaches some upland where the air is fresher, where the whole talk of mere politicians is stilled, where men can look in each other’s faces and see that there is nothing to conceal, that all they have to talk about they are willing to talk about in the open and talk about with each other; and whence, looking back over the road, we shall see at last that we have fulfilled our promise to mankind. We had said to all the world, "America was created to break every kind of monopoly, and to set men free, upon a footing of equality, upon a footing of opportunity, to match their brains and their energies." and now we have proved that we meant it.

• Message to the Congress on the State of the Union - Franklin D. Roosevelt - January 11, 1944 : http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/index.asp?document=87

• All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

  America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

  One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis—recently emphasized the grave dangers of "rightist reaction" in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called "normalcy" of the 1920’s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.

  I ask the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic bill of rights—for it is definitely the responsibility of the Congress so to do. Many of these problems are already before committees of the Congress in the form of proposed legislation. I shall from time to time communicate with the Congress with respect to these and further proposals. In the event that no adequate program of progress is evolved, I am certain that the Nation will be conscious of the fact.

  Our fighting men abroad—and their families at home—expect such a program and have the right to insist upon it. It is to their demands that this Government should pay heed rather than to the whining demands of selfish pressure groups who seek to feather their nests while young Americans are dying…

  Each and every one of us has a solemn obligation under God to serve this Nation in its most critical hour—to keep this Nation great—to make this Nation greater in a better world.

To Form A More Perfect Union - A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution - ROBERT A. MCGUIRE

• http://www.oup-usa.org/isbn/0195139704.html

• Many important questions regarding the creation and adoption of the United States Constitution remain unresolved. Did slaveholdings or financial holdings significantly influence our Founding Fathers' stance on particular clauses or rules contained in the Constitution? Was there a division of support for the Constitution related to religious beliefs or ethnicity? Were founders from less commercial areas more likely to oppose the Constitution? To Form a More Perfect Union successfully answers these questions and offers an economic explanation for the behavior of our Founding Fathers during the nation's constitutional founding.

  In 1913, American historian Charles A. Beard controversially argued in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States that the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution were less interested in furthering democratic principles than in advancing specific economic and financial interests. Beard's thesis eventually emerged as the standard historical interpretation and remained so until the 1950s. Since then, many constitutional and historical scholars have questioned an economic interpretation of the Constitution as being too narrow or too calculating, believing the great principles and political philosophies that motivated the Founding Fathers to be worthier subjects of study.

  In this meticulously researched reexamination of the drafting and ratification of our nation's Constitution, Robert McGuire argues that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, George Mason and the other Founding Fathers did act as much for economic motives as for abstract ideals. To Form a More Perfect Union offers compelling evidence showing that the economic, financial, and other interests of the founders can account for the specific design and adoption of our Constitution. This is the first book to provide modern evidence that substantiates many of the overall conclusions found in Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation while challenging and overturning other of Beard's specific findings. To Form a More Perfect Union presents an entirely new approach to the study of the shaping of the U.S. Constitution. Through the application of economic thinking and rigorous statistical techniques, as well as the processing of vast amounts of data on the economic interests and personal characteristics of the Founding Fathers, McGuire convincingly demonstrates that an economic interpretation of the Constitution is valid. Radically challenging the prevailing views of most historians, political scientists, and legal scholars, To Form a More Perfect Union provides a wealth of new findings about the Founding Fathers' constitutional choices and sheds new light on the motivations behind the design and adoption of the United States Constitution.