Interpretations of the American Constitution

Deedhiti

The first explanations of the origins of the Constitution, advanced by early national historians such as
George Bancroft, harmonized perfectly with this universal approval. The document was described as
a product of the whole people of the United States acting in a moment of crisis with a unity and
inspiration born of divine guidance. Historians of the period which followed the Civil War, focusing
on evolution from Germanic origins or attempting to apply the methods of physical science, found
substitutes for the concept of divine intervention but did not suggest that the country had been
anything but unanimous in its sponsorship and ratification of the Constitution.

Meanwhile, the proponents of economic determinism were making little progress in persuading
Americans in general and historians in particular that the dynamic ingredient in the evolution of a
society was not to be found in political beliefs, moral principles, or racial characteristics. But in the
1890*5 there arose around the figure of Frederick Jackson Turner a group which emphasized the
economic basis of our political development without subscribing to a belief in revolutionary class
struggle.

Turner made economic explanations somewhat more native and therefore more respectable.
However, although his influence continued to grow, economic determinism was still considered a
radical doctrine of sinister implications when Charles A. Beard's book was published, in 1913. The
storm of protest with which An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution was greeted had its
roots in two strong American feelings: hatred of the Marxian implications of economic determinism
and a traditional reverence for the Constitution as an expression of Democratic feeling and an
instrument of popular government.

First, he suggested that, far from having unanimous support, the Constitution was conceived and
ratified by a small group which, by adroit manoeuvring, controlled elections and conventions in such
a way that the majority opposition to ratification was defeated. What had drawn this group
together, he held, was their property interests, endangered by a weak central government and state
governments too often controlled by the debtor classes. Beard attempted to place this assertion on
a factual basis by analyzing the property, investments, and political beliefs of each of the delegates.
Beard estimated that their value increased by some $40,000,000 when the credit of the new federal
government was put behind them under the Hamiltonian program.

Beard asserted that the Constitution itself reflected this background and could be analyzed as an
economic document designed for the protection of property rights. The most striking evidence in
support of this view, he believed, could be found in the Federalist Papers of Madison, Jay, and
Hamilton: contemporary arguments contrived to aid in the ratification process. These writings called
attention not only to specific provisions guarding contracts and debts but also to such broad
principles as the separation of powers and the strong judiciary, which could result in devices able to
thwart the majority rule.

It was an economic document drawn with superb skill by men whose property interests were
immediately at stake; and as such it appealed directly and unerringly to identical interests in the
country at large.

Forrest McDonald

We the People is the first significant attempt that has been made to challenge Beard's interpretation
on Beard's own grounds. He employed Beard's own research methods, and after a painstaking
examination of thousands of documents and records, reached conclusions almost exactly the
opposite of Beards. McDonald found, on the contrary, that there was no such distinct cleavage
between economic groups supporting and opposing the Constitution (personalty and fealty). The
Constitution was not the work of a handful of designing rich men, but rather the result of an
extremely complex "interplay of conditioning or determining factors". The Constitutional
Convention of I787 was a fair cross-section of the geo graphical areas and political factions of the
country. The members of that body were not a cohesive group moved by an identity of economic
concern. Their votes did not indicate an alliance of personalty interests against those of realty. The
economic character of American society at the time, in terms of interest groups, was much more
complex than Beard had supposed. McDonald concludes, therefore, that Beard's economic
interpretation is unworkable because it is "entirely incompatible with the facts". Nevertheless,
McDonald feels that the facts do warrant the assumption that economic factors were influential in
the making of the Constitution.

Robert Brown

On the subject of methods, Brown brings two charges against Beard: one, that he distorted evidence
by misusing sources and statistics; two, that he based his conclusions on clearly inadequate research.

Brown's microscopic scrutiny of Beard's evidence leads him to state not that Beard was
unquestionably wrong, but that his evidence did not demonstrate what it was alleged to
demonstrate. First, he declares, Beard did not prove in any legitimate scholarly fashion that
American politics were in fact controlled by the seaboard elite. On the contrary, Brown suggests,
Beard's own evidence could lead to the opposite conclusion, namely, that in a highly homogeneous
society of small farmers, a nation 95% rural in 1790, these small farmers constituted the dominant
political power. Second, Brown maintains, Beard's evidence does not support his hypothesis of an
embryonic class struggle between commercial and agrarian interests. The United States were a
democratic, middle-class society with widely diffused property ownership and much more public
participation in the political process than has generally been supposed. Thus, the Constitutional
Convention was not a conclave of an undemocratic elite, but a gathering of responsible
representatives of the people who were selected in the same manner as representatives to
Congress, i.e., by the state legislatures.

The failure of the authors of the Constitution to include a suffrage provision did not stem from any
bias against democracy, for they sent the issue back to the states where voting rights were
extensive. Then, finally, it becomes clear that the small number of voters on the ratification issue did
not stem from disfranchisement, much less from Federalist machination, but from a widespread
indifference to the outcome which was itself a form of passive approval.

His contention was that most free male Americans of adult age already possessed the franchise, and
that the Constitution was accepted-actively and to a greater degree passively-by an overwhelming
majority of the people. Quite aware that there were freehold requirements, Brown nevertheless
contends that political democracy was achieved through the broad distribution of property.

Douglas Adair

Although James Madison wrote the Tenth Federalist in 1787 it was not until I9I3, one hundred and
twenty five years later, that Charles A. Beard made this particular essay famous for students of the
United States Constitution. After Beard's book appeared the Tenth Federalist became the essay most
often quoted to explain the philosophy of the fathers, and thus the "ultimate meaning" of the United
States Constitution itself.

The most philosophical examination of the foundations of political science is made by Madison in the
tenth number. Here he lays down, in no uncertain language, the principle that the fast and
elemental concern of every government is economic.

In the process of studying the evolution of Madison's ideas it will become apparent that it is highly
anachronistic to tag his theory "anti-democratic" in the nineteenth- or twentieth-century meaning of
the term. Madison's Tenth Federalist is eighteenth-century political theory directed to an
eighteenth-century problem; and it is one of the great creative achievements of that intellectual
movement that later ages have christened "Jeffersonian democracy”.

Beard’s major thesis about the Constitution implied that "theory" played little or no part in the
creation of the Federal Union and that theories are unimportant in politics. Adair was able to
demonstrate that, far from using philosophy as a false propaganda or rationalization to disguise
economic motives, James Madison and his colleagues were serious in their belief ''that politics may
be reduced to a science'' and in their conviction that the political experience of the past was a
veritable mine from which knowledge and wisdom might be quarried. Adair argued that Beard was
only slightly concerned with Madison's theory as theory, but found in his essay the element-the
doctrine of class struggle-which, was lifted out of context. Charles Beard's An Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution published in I9I3 was the climactic product of the left wing of
"progressive" scholar ship-a work whose artful selectivity dealt with those particular features of the
Constitution which were most distressing to the American radicals of the first decade of the
twentieth century

Gordon Wood

Wood argues that Beard’s notion that men’s property holdings, particularly personalty holdings,
determined their ideas and their behavior was so crude that no further time should be spent on it.
Yet while Beard’s interpretation of the origins of the Constitution in a narrow sense is undeniably
dead, the general interpretation of the Progressive generation of historians— that the Constitution
was in some sense an aristocratic document designed to curb the democratic excesses of the
Revolution—still seems to me to be the most helpful framework for understanding the politics and
ideology surrounding the Constitution. What is needed is not a restrictive economic interpretation
but rather a broad social interpretation in which the struggle over the Constitution is viewed as the
consequence of opposing ideologies rooted in differing social circumstances.

According to Beard, the Federalists were manifestly concerned with revising the Articles of
Confederation and with correcting the deficiencies of the federal government that prevented it from
coping with the national problems plaguing the Union. This goal, Wood thinks, was quite incidental,
since the primary aim of the Federalists was to redress the chaotic social situation in the states and
to restore virtuous government there. In short, they differ over whether the Constitutional
Convention was convened primarily to rectify matters on the national or on the state level.

On the basis of his analysis of the Founders' motives, Wood concludes that "their Constitution failed,
and failed miserably, in what they wanted it to do." This conclusion, of course, is premised on the
assumption that the principal concern of the delegates was the turbulent scene in the states and
that their Constitution was framed mainly to allow the aristocracy to over- come the tumultuous
demands of democracy emanating from there.
While Beard regarded the Federalists as a modernizing, forward-looking force, Wood sees them as
members of a retrograde element who failed in the task they had set for themselves at the
Constitutional Convention. In Wood's eyes, the Antifederalists were the progressive, modernizing
component in the debate that arose over the adoption of the Constitution, and they were the ones
who really shaped the face of America as we know it today.

His portrayal of the Federalists as a retrograde, even reactionary, element and the Anti- federalists
as farsighted modernists is seen to be quite untenable.

Cecilia Kenyon

She argues that the ideological context of the Constitution was as important in determining its form
as were the economic interests and motivations of its framers, and that the failure of Beard and his
followers to examine this context has rendered their interpretation of the Constitution and its origin
necessarily partial and unrealistic.

Instead of a study of the political beliefs current in 1787, Beard was pre-occupied in 1913 with his
period's interest in reforming the structure of the national government to make it more democratic,
which by his standards meant more responsible to simple majority rule. Thus, he judged an
eighteenth-century frame of government by a twentieth-century political doctrine. The effect was to
suggest by implication that the men who in 1787-1788 thought the Constitution aristocratic and
antagonistic to popular government (Anti-Federalists) thought so for the same reasons as Beard. The
evidence shows clearly that their reasons were substantially different.

The conception of the Constitution as the product of a conservative reaction against the ideals of
the Revolution has been widely accepted and Beard's analysis of the document itself commonly
followed. Surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the Anti-Federalists, but it is implied
especially by authors like Wood that they were the true heirs of the Revolutionary tradition-equally
devoted to individual liberty and majority rule.

But the objections of the Anti-Federalists were not directed toward the barriers imposed on simple
majority rule by the Constitution. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists shared a profound distrust of
man's capacity to use power wisely and well. They believed self-interest to be the dominant motive
of political behaviour, no matter whether the form of government be republican or monarchical, and
they believed in the necessity of constructing political machinery that would restrict the operation of
self-interest and prevent men entrusted with political power from abusing it. This was the
fundamental assumption of the men who wrote the Constitution, and of those who opposed its
adoption, as well. The fundamental issue over which Federalists and Anti-Federalists split was the
question whether republican government could be extended to embrace a nation, or whether it
must be limited to the comparatively small political and geographical units which the separate
American states then constituted. The Anti-Federalists took the latter view; and in a sense they were
the conservatives of 1787, and their opponents the radicals.

The Anti-Federalists were not latter-day democrats. Least of all were they majoritarians with respect
to the national government. They were not confident that the people would always make wise and
correct choices in either their constituent or electoral capacity. The Anti Federalists were not
advocates of strong, positive action by the national government. Their philosophy was primarily one
of limitations on power, and if they had had their way, the Constitution would have contained more
checks and balances. But they lacked both the faith and the vision to extend their principles nation-
wide. It was the Federalists of I787-1788 who created a national framework which would
accommodate the later rise of democracy.