Spring 2017— Political Idealism And The American Founding: Whig Principles And The Origins Of The Republic
During the past few months, I have become deeply
concerned over the tendency of professional historians—the dons of the campus
classrooms and the arbiters of higher learning who influence so much of what we
think about ourselves and our country—to rewrite our national history and
dispense ideologically-motivated misinformation and outright lies concerning
the origin story behind the United States of America. The truth of the matter
is that the American Founding—the collective events of the final thirty years
of the eighteenth century that resulted in the thirteen British colonies of
North America rebelling against their imperial masters and forming the United
States of America—was an unprecedented phenomenon in world history.
Accomplishing what no other group of European imperial colonists had ever
before achieved, the Americans banded together and defeated the mightiest
military power on the planet. Without any substantive history of long-lived
cooperation, by the 1790s the American independence movement had secured a
wholly new form of republican government, a market economy freed from the
constraints of mercantilism, and a pattern of development that would ultimately
spread American brands of democracy and freedom to almost every corner of the
globe.
Historians have attempted to understand exactly what
it was that motivated the Founding generation. In the 1930s, Charles A. Beard,
a history professor at Columbia University, chose to view the Founding through
an economic lens and saw in the American revolutionaries an expression of
Marxist class struggle on behalf of vested commercial interests. During the
Cold War and in more recent years, other historians have refuted this strictly
economic interpretation. Joseph J. Ellis, a professor at the University of Massachusetts,
has argued that although there are many legitimate ways to analyze the
Founding, the motivations for the American Revolution should be explained
primarily by political idealism and “Whig” principles of freedom. Considering
Beard’s economic viewpoint and Ellis’ political viewpoint, which of these two
interpretations provides a more compelling explanation? For understanding the
motivations behind the American Founding, Ellis’ model of political idealism
provides a far more persuasive explanation than the more limited class struggle
framework offered by Beard. This blog post will provide descriptions of both
models and their historical contexts, demonstrating that Ellis’ argument is
more convincing, comprehensive, and accepting of interpretations and evidence
that Beard explicitly sought to downplay or ignore.
Many historians in the 1930s believed that economic
conflict is a major theme of history, and that history usually comes down on
the side of vested interests. Charles A. Beard, author of An Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, was prominent among
this generation of historians whose experiences in the tumultuous years of the
Great Depression shaped their approach to the American Founding. Beard based
his book’s thesis upon the notion that human history is essentially a struggle
between “the people” and “the interests” with economic clout, and that this
struggle plays out time and time again between rich and poor, agriculturalists
and urban commercialists, and debtors and creditors. Beard once expressed his agreement with the
sentiment that “profound economic questions have now arisen and students of the
younger generation, true to their age, will occupy themselves with economic aspects
of history.” He was a progressive who
fervently believed in the power of history to help explain and solve the
contemporary economic problems facing the nation in his day, and he used his
understanding of history to criticize the powerful interests of the wealthy he
felt were directly responsible for what had gone wrong with the United States’
economic fortunes.
Beard believed that Karl Marx’s theory of class
struggle was the only model worth applying when studying the origins of the
American Founding. In studying America’s past, his theory actively targeted the
Constitution of the United States as a negative, anti-democratic document. He lamented that “the Constitution was
essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental
private rights of property are…morally beyond the reach of popular
majorities…the Constitution was not created by ‘the whole people’…but it was
the work of a consolidated group whose interests knew no state boundaries and
were truly national in their scope.”
Beard viewed the Founding Fathers of the United States—men like George
Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson—as wealthy, self-interested
property holders who only bankrolled and supported the American Revolution
because it benefited their personal financial interests. According to Beard’s
model, the Constitution was written by economic elites who cared little for the
political ideals of freedom and equality to which they gave lip service. These
high-minded principles were nothing more than an advantageous mask designed to
conceal the inglorious reality: the wealthy “interests” that Beard had warned
so much about had written the Constitution to benefit themselves and
disenfranchise everyone else in American society. For Beard, there was no room
for any other possible interpretation of the Founding generation.
With the end of the Depression and the Second World
War, later generations of historians contributed to the debate concerning the
American revolutionaries’ motivations and rejected what they saw as the
limitations of Beard’s economic model. By the 1960s, Beard’s version of the
Founding had lost a great deal of credibility in the eyes of many experts. With
increasing conviction, historians chose to interpret the American Revolution
and its aftermath in terms outside the purview of economics and certainly
outside Marxist conceptions of class struggle.
As one historian put it, while the progressives had written their
history of the Founding in concert with the spirit of their times and coinciding
with an economic depression: “The absence of serious internal economic problems
and the general levelling of society [had] enabled [scholars in the post-World
War II era] to avoid that central preoccupation with economic questions that
led many [progressive] scholars…to wrench Revolutionary events out of
context.” Just as the progressive
historians of Beard’s time had written their histories of the American Founding
in light of contemporary historical developments, the historians of the Cold
War era felt it necessary to take account of epistemological trends in their
own time period. Just as Beard had felt it necessary to focus on an economic
interpretation of the Founding Fathers and the principles contained in the U.S.
Constitution, the historians of the 1950s and 1960s felt justified in ascribing
very different motivations to America’s revolutionary eighteenth century
colonists. Considering the ideological tensions that swept the world after the
Second World War, it should not be surprising that historians in the Cold War
period criticized Beard for what they saw as a limited economic viewpoint; for
them, Beard’s Marxist framework suggested a naiveté that threatened the
integrity of the American Founding’s idealistic symbolism.
In more recent historiography, Joseph J. Ellis
explained that a political interpretation of the American Founding—as opposed
to a strictly economic one—is the real key to understanding the birth of the
United States. In his book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation,
Ellis acknowledged the contributions of scholars who, like Beard, had
highlighted the self-interested role of the propertied elites among the
Founding Fathers. In doing so, Ellis did
not completely discard the verity of Beard’s model. However, Ellis believed
historians often attempted to avoid writing political histories of the Founding
because of the professional criticism they might receive. It is likely that much of this potential
criticism can be attributed to the longevity—if not the exclusive credibility—of
Beard’s economic interpretation of the American Founding. Nevertheless, Ellis
openly rejected this criticism and insisted that the best way to properly
understand the truth behind the American Founding’s origins was to accept that
“the central events and achievements of the revolutionary era and the early
republic were political.” It is
nonsensical, Ellis claimed, to suggest that the politically idealistic fervor
of the Founding Fathers was somehow unimportant to the unfolding drama of the
Founding.
For Ellis, Beard’s economic outlook was not enough;
fundamentally, the American Founding was not about competing economic classes,
but competing political ideals. “For the core argument used to discredit the
authority of Parliament and the British monarch, the primal source of what were
called Whig principles,” Ellis explained, “was an obsessive suspicion of any
centralized political power.” In other
words, the American Founding Fathers felt that no central government authority
should be permitted or empowered to coerce the citizenry without the consent of
the governed. Liberty, unalienable individual rights, the ultimate sovereignty
of the people, opposition to monarchy, the celebration of civic virtue—all were
fundamental elements of the Whig political tradition that inspired the American
Founding in its opposition to the corrupting influence of autocratic British
rule. Through all this, Ellis never completely refuted Beard’s economic
interpretation; rather he simply transcended it by making a case that political
idealism provided a better and more comprehensive lens through which to view
the American Founding. Beard’s class struggle framework, while factually and
statistically tenable for argument’s sake, did not tell the full story and
unfairly wrenched Revolutionary events out of proper context.
It is difficult for contemporary historians to
create a true consensus about the motivations behind the American Founding, but
this only augments the need for more comprehensive and inclusive
interpretations. Peter Novick, a history professor at the University of Chicago
who studied the issue of historical objectivity, wrote that by the 1960s,
“American historians came to see…the framers of the Constitution, rather than
having self-interested motives, were led by concern for political unity,
national economic development, and diplomatic security.” It is interesting to note that while Novick
made it clear that he did not subscribe to Beard’s limited understanding of the
Founding in terms of class warfare, he also did not eliminate economics
entirely from the discussion. Rather, he claimed that economics is just one
narrative among many that make up the American Founding. Other narratives
include politics and diplomacy; more could surely be added to the discussion
with emerging work in the fields of gender studies and race relations. In
studying the American Founding, there is great value in using and accessing
multiple perspectives and categories of evidence. The American Founding and the
United States’ subsequent positive role in world history as a republic of
limited government and individual rights is a story that can be told from many
different angles, and it is a tale that should command affection and devotion
in every human heart.
Any tension between the arguments set forth by Beard
and Ellis can be resolved with a quick look at events since the Founding.
According to the 1790 census, nearly 700,000 inhabitants of the new American
nation were African-American slaves, providing damning counter-evidence to
Ellis’ Whig principles of freedom. As Ellis himself admitted, the American
institution of slavery acted as “a kind of demographic defiance of all the
republican rhetoric since the heady days of 1776.” Slavery certainly provided a workable example
of class exploitation—if not open and outright class warfare—in the narrative
of the American Founding. However, when the American Civil War, the
emancipation and enfranchisement of African-Americans, and the civil rights
movement of the 20th century are considered, the transcendence of Ellis’
argument over Beard’s becomes clear. If class warfare ever had a place in the
story of America’s Founding, Whig principles resolved those problems in terms
of political freedom that Beard rejected and Ellis extolled. Indeed, Whig
notions of freedom and equality have inspired many succeeding generations of
Americans to work out—and continue to fight over—many of American democracy’s
discrepancies in the realm of economics as well as in race, religion, and
gender equality.
In comparing the two perspectives outlined in this
paper, Ellis’ model of political idealism remains the most compelling
explanation of the Founding because it does not explicitly limit the types of
evidence worth considering. It does not completely refute the value of economic
interpretations but instead enshrines political idealism as the first and
foremost interpretation of the American Founding. Whereas Beard’s model is
explicitly limiting and exclusive, Ellis’ is merely preferential. Beard’s model
of class struggle may have made sense to the historians of the 1930s, but it
made little sense to Cold War historians and could not explain the violent
overthrow in the 1860s of American slavery, an institution of class
exploitation that ultimately made way before the advance of Whig political
freedoms. This Whig philosophy of government and society, central to Ellis’
contention that political idealism was the primary motivating factor behind the
American Founding, provided the ideological groundwork for not just the
Founders, but also for many later generations of Americans who have striven to
achieve economic prosperity and equal treatment on the basis of race, religion,
and gender.
The opening years of the 21st century have seen the
United States maintain its position as not just the most powerful political and
economic state actor on the world stage, but also the world’s longest-surviving
republic. This republican form of government, which helped enable the United
States to rise to such dizzying heights of political influence and economic
prosperity, has provided the institutional framework for all subsequent
developments in American history. Generations of Americans have lived, dreamed,
and chased their own versions of the pursuit of happiness protected by
America’s Founding documents. Consciously or unconsciously, Americans from all
walks of life and backgrounds have felt the influence of Whig principles of
universal liberty, individual rights, and independence from tyranny—even
historians who have tried to exclude these principles from their professional
analysis of the Founding. No matter how the Founding Fathers and their
remarkable political achievements are interpreted, it is crucial to understand
that Whig principles espoused by the Revolutionary generation provide the
ideological sinew that binds all American citizens to one another. This sinew
should also tie the historical profession together, no matter how varied
historians’ own individual interpretations of past events may be. In this way,
appreciating the political idealism that provided motivation for the American
Founding is surely the most inclusive approach to understanding the birth of
the oldest republic the world has ever known.
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