Review: An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles Beard

New York: Macmillan, 1914

As reconstructed by Charles Beard in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States the state legislatures of the United States of America in the period of the "Congress of the Confederation," struggling with an unsatisfactory "first" American constitution, elected by a very limited franchise, appointed delegates--delegates overwhelmingly from urban, coastal and moneyed backgrounds, lawyers and businessmen in the main, and nearly all born well-to-do rather than "self-made men"--to a Convention to amend the Articles of Confederation. Instead, rather dramatically exceeding their mandate, they produced a whole new Constitution, they got it ratified not by the aforementioned state legislatures but going around them by turning over the vote to conventions they set up in each state. The terms of those conventions made it, as Beard explains, "highly probable that not more than one-fourth or one-fifth of the adult white males took part in the election of delegates to the state conventions" (indeed, he thinks that estimate high) while even so getting the "right" results from this limited part of a limited franchise took some strongarming to secure rather narrow wins--with the last two states, North Carolina and Rhode Island, compelled by the hard realities of power to accede to the new Constitution after it went into force.

Hardly a triumph of popular sovereignty, Beard quotes John Burgess' remark that "had such acts been performed by Julius [Caesar] or Napoleon, they would have been pronounced coups d'etat"--by, again, the economic elite of the country, in the service of their economic interests. Those invested in public securities, Western lands, manufacturing and money-landing wanted a stable government that would redeem the paper they held at face value, make sure their claims on the frontier were legally secure and militarily protected, defend American industry with a national market walled off with a national tariff and a navy to protect the trade on which it relied, and see that debtors did not get out of paying their debts or slipping out from their obligations to their creditors with "funny money" paper currency schemes (James Madison, in the famous Federalist No. 10, holding "[a] rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts," along with a proto-Communist "equal division of property" to be an "improper or wicked project"). They were also quite happy to make concessions to a plantocracy less interested in these areas than in safeguarding its interest in slavery. Of course, the Constitution they got did indeed correspond to this, by its declaring for Federal responsibility for the public debts in question; its authorization of an army and navy; its denying the states the right to institute tariffs, issue paper money or otherwise come to the relief of debtors, reserving those powers to Congress. (Thus does Section 10 of Article I, "Powers Denied the States," declare that "No state shall . . . coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any . . . Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts," or "without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing . . . inspection Laws.") And while it put a twenty year limit on the slave trade, it left the Peculiar Institution as such intact. Meanwhile, through an elaborate separation of powers, combined with a heavy reliance on indirect election and appointments (thus were Senators appointed by state legislatures for six year terms, to check the more popularly accessible House), it made amendment of the document exceedingly difficult (the more in as, declining to eliminate state-level restrictions on the franchise using property qualifications) the country still fell far short of universal manhood suffrage (and upheld slavery).

Beard's case, breaking with the tradition of, when not merely piling up facts in a "scientific" fashion, treating American history as a story of Providential or racial (Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic) triumph, in favor of an "economic interpretation" of events, made this very book a major moment of intellectual life in the Progressive era. If it undeniably outraged some, it was also an inspiration to others, who found it far more illuminating of past and present realities than the schoolbook stuff longer on inculcating patriotism than historical understanding. However, there was a rather predictable assault on it in the 1950s, just as there was an assault on so much of what the Progressive era produced, and in a few years' time Beard's work was treated as, if having any interest at all, being interesting only as a discredited relic from another time.

From what I have seen of the attacks (criticisms of some of Beard's calculations about the weight of financial and landed interest in the country, as if the distribution of power and play of interests and manipulation of the levers of power were no more complex than that) they were less intellectually overpowering than many pretended them to be--the more in as Beard, for all the vast biographical and statistical evidence he assembled in this volume, was himself so emphatic about his book being merely the beginning of a line of inquiry, rather than the last word on the subject. Rather than any scholarly failings on Beard's part it seems that just as literary critics heaped scorn upon novelists such as Upton Sinclair or Sinclair Lewis for having written socially critical works, so did historians of this era attack the socially critical historiography of the earlier part of the century--historians who noticed the existence of class and elite self-interest (Rich people use politics to defend their interests? Heavens no!), especially in relation to anything so foundational as the Constitution, no longer stomached with conflict out and "consensus" in, while the chilling effects of the Cold War on such historiography endured long afterward (just as, broadly, Anti-Communism never really ceased to be the "national religion"), with the result that Beard's reputation, just like that of Sinclair or Lewis, never really recovered. Still, for all that it has been a touchstone for scholars down to the present, with Andrew Bacevich relying on Beard in his critical (if by no means leftist) vision of American history. More recently, seeing the heavy attention to the concerns of creditors in the era of the Constitution's making (not least as reflected in the work of Madison and company) had me thinking again and again of the work of Michael Hudson and David Graeber regarding the importance of the old struggle of creditor and debtor, and how completely the interests of the creditor have tended to prevail in modern times--not only at the level of policy, but even the understanding of morality. However much orthodox ideologues may dislike it, Beard's relevance may have outlasted the reputation they were so desperate to wreck.