An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States is the title of an influential work by the American historian Charles A. Beard , published in 1913 . The study, which is central to the so-called "progressive historiography" in the USA , uses contemporary sources to illuminate in detail the socio-economic frame of reference of all the individuals involved in the discussion and final fixing of the US Constitution in 1787 and argues that, from the respective structure of property , Income and property resulting class and interests has decisively shaped the form and content of the constitutional document . With this materialistic approach, Beard radically broke with the previously unreservedly dominating representations, which the so-called Founding Fathers had portrayed either as extraordinary, idealistic individuals, as the highest expression of a specifically Anglo-Saxon “political genius” or even as directly guided by “divine guidance”.

content

starting point

When writing his study, the author considered the central deficit of political and historical thought in the USA to be the overarching dominance of abstract principles (freedom, separation of powers, federalism, the individual, etc.), which, according to Beard, identified as "American" and as - misunderstood - Arguments would be used in a wide variety of disputes about problems of current politics or the past without their exact social origin, their original purpose and content ever being adequately investigated - “the absence of any consideration of the social and economic elements determining the thought of the thinkers themselves ”. This is the result of a widespread naive but nevertheless powerful illusion that the constitution imagines as the result of a representative consultation “by the whole people and having no interest or advantage of any particular group or class”. Even a cursory glance at the origins of the constitution shows, however, that it is nonsense to address "the people" as "the original source of all political authority exercised under it". Beard wanted to counter such speculative assumptions with evidence from the sources of a central economic benefit calculation, on the basis of which a coalition was formed in the summer of 1787, which finally enforced the constitution against strong opposition.

"The point is, that the direct, impelling motive (...) was the economic advantages which the beneficiaries expected would accrue to themselves first, from their action."

In formulating the hypothesis of an “economic determinism” in the genesis of the US constitution, Beard relied methodically on suggestions from the sociological legal discussion that had arisen in Europe, in particular on Rudolf von Ihering , but also linked to texts by socialist authors. From here he formulated his primary assumption:

"Law does not 'grow', but is, in fact, 'made' - adapted to precise interests which may be objectively determined."

Central results

According to Beard, an owner group interested in its immediate economic results pushed through the constitution in a kind of "counterrevolution" at the height of an economic and social disruption that was no longer controllable and that continued to grow even years after the end of the war of independence (see Shays' rebellion ). At the center of the dispute were debts (of private individuals, individual states, central government) and the fundamental question of how and with what means private property and the claims arising from this property could be secured.

"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."

Beard assumes some knowledge about the "first constitution", which was largely forgotten by historical memory in his time: the nation that emerged from the War of Independence was based exclusively on the constitutions of the individual states and on the articles of confederation adopted by the second continental congress until the summer of 1787 . The states were independent of one another and only loosely connected by Congress, to which each state sent a representative with voting rights. The headquarters acted, apart from the coin and postal system as well as the so-called "Indian affairs", almost without guaranteed competencies and with only minimal, even for this completely inadequate financial means.

The central problem caused by this construction would have become the debts of the individual states and the headquarters, which had accumulated during and after the War of Independence: According to Beard, they amounted to the enormous sum of around $ 60 million in government bonds alone in 1787 (for comparison: total taxable immovable property in the 13 states at that time did not exceed $ 400 million). In addition there were the debts of private individuals, mainly small and large landowners. Both the public sector and private individuals had largely stopped repayments and interest payments at this point; the price of government bonds had sometimes fallen to a twentieth of their face value, so they were practically worthless. The large-scale land speculation "in western lands" was on the verge of collapse, since the incapable of acting headquarters could not guarantee the security of these areas - not to mention their further expansion, settlement and appreciation.

In this situation - so Beard - the wealthy on the verge of ruin (insofar as they were creditors or speculators) made the successful attempt to overthrow the foundations of constitutional law to achieve a strong debt repayment ("a government with an adequate taxing power") and in general to create all - internally and externally - guaranteeing use and exploitation claims resulting from private property.

Beard underlined the "class character" of this movement by showing that the vast majority of the population ("the slaves , the indented servants, the mass of men who could not qualify for voting under the property tests (...) and women") was without any influence on the emerging core documents; He calculated that, due to the restrictive records of ownership and assets, a maximum of 160,000 men (but probably significantly fewer), mostly indirectly through elected or appointed representatives, took part in the constitutional discussion or ratification.

Beard's intensive analysis of the respective "economic biographies" of these representatives acting effectively at the national and national level shows that all persons with financial or commercial interests ("merchants, money lenders, security holders, manufacturers, shippers, capitalists, (. ..) financiers and their professional associates ”) resolutely supported the constitution, while the most emphatic opposition came just as clearly from debtors, almost exclusively farmers and landowners. Beard called the social basis of these (merely) land-owning “freeholders” “real property”, while that of the mainly urban-mercantile financial interests “personal property”. The will to change in and around the Confederation Congress clearly came from the latter group:

"If we may judge from the politics of the Congress under the Articles of Confederation, two related groups were most active: those working for the establishment of a revenue sufficient to discharge the interest and principal of the public debt, and those working for commercial regulations advantageous to personalty operations in shipping and manufacturing and in western land speculations. "

Basically, the indebted landowners are in the concentration of a "democratic" power that they can control in the municipalities, a weak central state power that is not internally inconsistent, a partial or complete cancellation of debts and the introduction of paper money - in total, the retention of the confederation. been interested. However, according to Beard, this group was too fragmented socially and, not least, geographically, to overcome the limits of its maximum national horizon and to become a truly national political force. In the constitutional convention their resistance was ultimately broken because of this organizational and mobility disadvantage or was structurally inferior from the start; In the last decision, however, it also played a role that the proponents of the constitution were able to gather the former officers of the Continental Army almost completely behind them, namely Washington - "probably the richest man in the United States in his time". From this direction, a military coup and even the establishment of a monarchical form of government were threatened more than once, at least indirectly. In 1786, what would later become the first Secretary of War, Henry Knox, wrote to Washington with a view to the unrest in Massachusetts :

"They [die insurgents around Shays ] feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to remedy the former. (...) In a word they are determined to annihilate all debts public and private and have agrarian Laws. (...) This dreadful situation has alarmed every man of principle and property in New England . (...) Our government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives and property. "

Beard saw "the political science of the new system" in the Federalist Papers accomplished in a perfect manner; As he tried to show in detail, their arguments revolve almost permanently around “territory, commerce, the national debt, and violations of contractual rights in property”, albeit often with ideological trimmings. Nevertheless, according to Beard, the real historical punch line lay in the fact that there was very little political philosophy, but the more interested finance and land speculators initiated and enforced the constitutional document in an ex- and intensively advancing capitalist development of North America:

"The Constitution (...) was the work of a consolidated group whose interests knew no state boundaries and were truly national in their scope."

reception

Initially, the study was ignored or - especially by law and political science - fought with "indignant fury"; Federal Judge Holmes , who is sometimes critical of the usual interpretation and commentary on the constitution, also called it “outrageous”. Beard left Columbia University in 1917, not least because of a campaign against him by the New York Times . Since he repeatedly showed solidarity with political currents that were fought as “subversively” (for example during the Palmer Raids in 1919/1920), his work was not considered worthy of discussion until the 1920s.

Over time, however, especially immediately before and during the New Deal era, his positions developed a comparatively broad impact. A history of the USA ( The Rise of American Civilization ) , written by him and his wife, the historian and suffragette Mary R. Beard, first published in 1927 generalized his basic results; it was a great success both scientifically and with the public, and until the 1940s saw several, constantly expanded, new editions. Against the background of the profound state and social crisis, some historians, but also other intellectuals as well as parts of the political, journalistic and administrative establishment were ready to break with the basic affirmative attitude that had hitherto been taken for granted, and to break with essential problems of the history and present of the United States To discuss states from the perspective of “property” and “class”.

Beard's renewed marginalization - which continues to the present day - began when, in the run-up to America's entry into World War II, he joined the Isolationists , who were politically remote from him , because he viewed the interventionist foreign policy of the Roosevelt administration as imperialist and rejected it. With this he was suddenly no longer quotable among left-liberal academics who had previously shown great acceptance for his theses. Certain statements by Beard - such as the fact that the slave-owning landowners were the pioneers of a “democratic tendency” in the early stages of the United States - made a renewed rapprochement almost impossible against the background of the civil rights debates of the post-war decades. Another thing was the assumption that conservative "revisionists" around Forrest McDonald carried out in the scientific community during the 1950s and 1960s that, given the multitude of different - "individual" - economic interests in the USA, one could not speak of solidified social classes or groups analytically at all , so also not to prove that the constitution is an expression and a document of class interests. More recent studies on this subject - for example the work by Joseph J. Ellis, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 - almost completely dispense with a social-historical classification or references to the earlier debates about Beard and, surprisingly, are often only collections of biographical anecdotes about the "Revolutionary Generation". However, some essential pioneering work by Beard, primarily key data on social and economic development in the founding decades of the United States, have been tacitly included in the accepted historiographical canon.

Web links

Wikisource: An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Beard, Charles A., An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, New York 1913, p. 3. From now on cited as Beard, Interpretation.
2. ^ Beard, Interpretation, p. 1.
3. ^ Beard, Interpretation, p. 9.
4. ↑ Beard, Interpretation p. 10.
5. ↑ Beard, Interpretation, p.10.See also p. 188.
6. ↑ Beard, Interpretation, pp. 17f.
7. ^ Beard, Interpretation, p. 16.
8. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, p. 14.
9. ↑ Beard, Interpretation, pp. 13f.
10. ^ "No popular vote was taken directly or indirectly on the proposition to call the Convention which drafted the Constitution." Beard, Interpretation, p. 324.
11. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, pp. 52ff.
12. ^ Beard, Interpretation, p. 324.
13. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, pp. 34ff.
14. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, p. 34.
15. ^ Beard, Interpretation, p. 49.
16. ↑ Beard, Interpretation, p. 40.
17. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, pp. 41f.
18. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, p. 63.
19. ↑ Beard, Interpretation, p. 24.
20. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, pp. 16, 64ff., 325.
21. ^ Beard, Interpretation, p. 17.
22. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, pp. 17, 26ff., 189ff.
23. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, pp. 24ff.
24. ^ Beard, Interpretation, p. 50.
25. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, p. 31 and passim.
26. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, pp. 217-291.
27. ^ Beard, Interpretation, p. 144.
28. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, pp. 38ff., 58, 144f.
29. ↑ Quoted from Beard, Interpretation, pp. 58f.
30. ^ Beard, Interpretation, p. 153.
31. ^ Beard, Interpretation, p. 187.
32. ↑ See Beard, Interpretation, p. 325.
33. ↑ Laski, Harold J., The American Democracy. A Commentary and an Interpretation, New York 1948, p. 417.
34. ↑ Quoted from Laski, Democracy, p. 417. See also p. 626.
35. ↑ See Laski, Democracy, pp. 22, 417.
36. ↑ See Horn, Rüdiger, Schäfer, Peter, Geschichte der USA 1914–1945, Berlin 1986, p. 75.
37. ↑ An introduction to the intellectual and cultural currents of this time is provided by the now classic work by Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M., The Crisis of the Old Order. 1919–1933 (The Age of Roosevelt, Volume 1), Boston 1957.
38. ↑ See Horn / Schäfer, Geschichte, p. 238.
39. ↑ See Beard, Charles A., President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941. Appearances and Realities, New Haven 1948.
40. ^ Elaborated in broad terms in Beard, Charles A., Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, New York 1915.
41. ↑ See McDonald, Forrest, We The People. The Economic Origins of the Constitution, Chicago 1958.
42. ^ Ellis, Joseph J., Founding Brothers. The Revolutionary Generation, New York 2000. This work lies as the same you created America. The founding generation from John Adams to George Washington, Munich 2002, also in German translation.