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Greedy White Founders? |
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Those of us involved in the ongoing struggle for economic justice don’t have much time in the day-to-day crush to think much about the nation’s past and how we got to where we are today. Occasions like the Fourth of July provide a good time to do so.
For many, the image of the Founding Fathers is one of elitist white men and slave owners who crafted a republic that, as James Madison famously wrote in the Federalist No. 10, would act as a restraint on
“citizens…united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
In other words, the structure of the U.S. government was specifically created to keep the “masses” under control.
While it’s true the founding fathers were all white men and nearly all slave owners, author and historian Thom Hartmann would have us believe they were more than just “greedy white men.” Hartmann, who now hosts a regular radio show on Air America, offers an intriguing perspective on the subject in his popular new book, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class.
In his chapter on “The Myth of the Greedy Founders” (which we’ve excerpted here, as an AFL-CIO guest column), Hartmann debunks Charles Beard’s 1913 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Beard’s interpretation, says Hartmann, provided scholars with the misconception that America was founded solely for the purpose of protecting wealth interests.
Unfortunately, many believe that our nation was founded exclusively of, by and for “rich white men” and that the Constitution had, as its primary purpose, the protection of the superrich. They would have us believe that the Constitution’s signers didn’t really mean all that flowery talk about liberal democracy in a republican form of government.
Instead, writes Hartmann:
The majority of the signers of the Constitution were actually acting against their own best economic interests when they put their signatures on that document, just as had the majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Hartmann’s source for rebuttal to Beard is the 1958 publication, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, by historian Forrest McDonald. In it, McDonald bluntly states that Beard’s “economic interpretation of the Constitution does not work.”
Writes Hartmann:
McDonald notes that a quarter of all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had voted in their own state legislatures for laws that would have helped debtors and the poor and thus harmed the interests of the rich. “These [bankruptcy/debt relief laws] were the very kinds of laws which, according to Beard’s hypothesis, the delegates had convened to prevent,” says McDonald. He adds: “Another fourth of the delegates had important economic interests that were adversely affected, directly and immediately, by the Constitution they helped write.
Ironically, the image of the founders perpetuated by Beard, a socialist, has been used by elitist politicians in recent years to advance an anti-worker agenda.
His myth unfortunately helps conservatives support ending the estate tax, or “death tax,” as the “the way the Founders would have wanted things” so that the very richest few can rule America.
But the signers didn’t send other people’s kids to war, as have two generations of the oligarchic Bush family. Many of the Founders themselves gave up everything, even risking (and losing) their lives, their life’s savings or their homes and families to conceive and birth this nation.
Neocons have a way of appropriating All-American ideals and turning them to their own inegalitarian purposes. In his recent biography of Tom Paine, historian Harvey Kaye shows how Paine, arguably the most democratic thinker circulating amid the likes of Madison, Jefferson and Hamilton, vehemently opposed slavery and outlined a series of public initiatives to address the inequalities that made life oppressive for working people. Paine was so progressive the nation’s elites sought to bury him from public memory. Yet the author of Common Sense has been championed in recent years by Ronald Reagan and those even further to the reactionary side. As Kaye writes:
Today, ever since Ronald Reagan recited Paine’s words in 1980, not only progressives, but also conservatives, quote Paine. Yet the latter really do not embrace him and his arguments—truly, they cannot. Furthering the interests of corporations over those of working people, they have subordinated the Republic to the marketplace and overseen a concentration of wealth and power recalling the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. Carrying on culture wars, they have divided the nation and undermined the wall separating church and state. And lying or hiding the truth, they have corrupted American public life and jeopardized our standing in the world.
The vision of the founders in embarking on this American experiment was not monolithic, nor were the documents they created—hence the endless court fights over interpreting the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Hartmann reminds us as a movement, we need to reclaim the democracy and economic justice promised more than 200 years ago in the actions and words of those who saw the promise of the new nation not as a one-time offer to the poor, the tired and the huddled masses—but as an ongoing project.
Hartmann provides an excellent corrective and a clarion call for those of us in the progressive movement to take back our nation, white founding men and all.
5 Comments
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There is absolutely no way that “citizens” meant the “masses”. Citizens were considered white, male, and property owning.
It is amazing to me that anyone could argue that an Aristocracy is a good thing. It’s funny that the blog post mentions the “Death Tax.” I’ve always called the “Death Tax” the “Aristocracy Tax”.
Here’s another myth dearly held by progressives but which has been ju jitsued by the right into preventing mass perception of economic reality: THE MIDDLE CLASS.
This icon is barely holding up as a sociological concept. It is definitely dead as a statisically valid economic concept.
The closest that journalists, politicians, and activists have come to grasping the bipolar economy is to recognize that the top 0.1% form a most unique class.
However, the grass-roots reality is that you either have the wealth (versus income) cushion or you don’t — that is, the cushion to emerge basically intact from a job loss, divorce, health emergency, transportation or housing setback, or any combination thereof.
The Haves are the 20% of us living in a household worth more than $2 million. Let’s face it, the other 80% are the Have-Nots.
The author of this column is just arguing by assertion, he offers no proof whatsoever in condemning Beard’s book. On the other hand, Beard’s book is well-documented. The “founding fathers” were protecting the ruling class interests of the time: large land-owners, including slave owners, exploiters of indentured servents, the Patroon system of serfdom, the theft of the land of native Americans (see how Indians are described in the Bill of Rights), etc… . Does the author, Tula Connell, actually read the texts of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution? I’d urge people to do so. They are really backward. Beard did actually read and research and his book stands the test of time. Any state (i.e. government) is used as a club to enforce the prevailing economic order. Now, instead of slavery and the rest of it circa. 1776, it’s now wage slavery, globalization, etc… . Time for labor leaders to wake up and get back to our socialist roots, including Beard’s wonderful book, for methods and principles which tell the unvarnished truth and could help organize our brothers and sisters to fight the titanic battles we need to fight.
Beard’s book is ‘well-documented’ and his economic ‘assertions’ were discredited over half a century ago.
“… the reality behind the words of the Declaration of Independence was that a rising class of important people needed to enlist on their side enough Americans to defeat England, without disturbing too much the relations of power and wealth that had developed over 150 years of colonial history. Indeed, 69 percent of the signers of the Declaration… had held colonial office under England. When the Declaration was read… from the town hall balcony in Boston, it was read by Thomas Crafts, a member of the Loyal Nine group, conservatives who opposed militant action against the British. Four days after the reading, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up on the Common for a military draft. The rich could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve. This led to rioting, and shouting,: “Tyranny is Tyranny let if come from whom it may.” — Howard Zinn, “A People’s History of the United States”