Introduction to the Transaction Edition

When Charles A. Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution was published in 1913, it received a mixed reception. On the one side, about half of the reviews in scholarly journals, including the most prestigious periodicals in the fields of American history, political science, and economics, were warm in their praise. On the other, former President William Howard Taft and future President Warren G. Harding roundly denounced the book, as did many newspapers and a goodly number of journals.

The yea-sayers, however, came to prevail, and did so with almost unparalleled speed. As early as 1918 Beard’s radical interpretation of the origins of the Constitution began to find its way into American history textbooks, and within a decade thereafter it had become the generally accepted view of the founding. This was a remarkably short time for any new thesis to penetrate the academic establishment, and particularly one that challenged so sacrosanct a subject. The thesis continued to grow in favor until the end of World War II, by which time the book had been reprinted fifteen times and dissenting voices had all but disappeared.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that dissent from Beard’s interpretation was virtually stifled during the 1930s and 1940s. Several authors of doctoral dissertations incorporated the economic interpretation into their studies even though the evidence they had dug up in their research ran contrary to it. Two of my teachers at the University of Texas, Eugene Campbell Barker and Caleb Perry Patterson, raged against the interpretation in private and in their classrooms, but both published college textbooks that followed Beard in toto. As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in the 1940s, Robert E. Brown was harassed mercilessly when he challenged Beard’s findings, and he was by no means the only budding young scholar to have such an experience. An Economic Interpretation had become a sacred cow, beyond the reach of “respectable” criticism. (“Politically correct” scholarship is not a recent invention.)

But a massive assault on Beard’s thesis was about to begin. The attack has been interpreted by some as a product of a changed Zeitgeist, the “conservative” political climate of the Eisenhower years, but that reading is untenable. In the first place, it is hardly sound to describe the period as conservative. It is true that the seeds of the conservative intellectual movement had been sown, or were just then being sown, in the works of Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and a few others; but it would be a generation before those seeds would germinate, mature, and bear fruit. Throughout Eisenhower’s occupancy of the White House, liberals dominated intellectual life and were in firm command of academia. In the second place, the fifties produced some of the best pro-Beardian as well as anti-Beardian scholarship. In the third, most of the critics had begun their researches in the 1940s, when New Deal/Fair Deal statism and even socialism had expressed the prevailing political mood in America. And in the fourth, what inspired many—me among them—were personal considerations that had nothing to do with the mood of the times. I shall return to that point in a moment.

Seven historians preceded me in the field, each nibbling away at portions of Beard’s analysis. Philip A. Crowl (1943), William Clay Pool (1950), Richard P. McCormick (1950), and Robert E. Thomas (1953) demonstrated that in Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Virginia, respectively, Beard’s thesis was irrelevant or entirely incompatible with the documentary evidence. Meanwhile Samuel Eliot Morison launched a bitter personal attack on Beard and all his works (1951), Douglass Adair showed that Beard’s analysis of James Madison’s Federalist 10 (a key part of Beard’s argument) was historically unsound (1944, 1951, 1957), and Robert E. Brown published a devastating critique of Beard’s methodology, logic, and use of evidence (1956).

Idiosyncratic, not ideological, concerns had stimulated most of these works, and the same kind of considerations led me to write We The People. Like William Clay Pool, I had been influenced by the teachings of Eugene Campbell Barker, and in 1949 I wrote a master’s thesis attacking An Economic Interpretation-an effort that delighted my mentor but that I later came to realize was almost terminally puerile. The next year Barker retired and was replaced by Fulmer Mood, an erratic but brilliant disciple and former student of Frederick Jackson Turner. Mood wisely persuaded me that I should change my approach to the subject. If I wished to understand the contest over the Constitution, he insisted, I should not focus on 1787 and 1788, as Beard had done, but should begin at least as early as 1776 (ultimately I concluded that I needed to push that back by a couple of centuries) and study every document I could find that related to American history between the starting point and, say, 1790. For more than three years I did so, traveling to the various repositories and devoting almost all my waking hours to the pursuit. In the process I accumulated several thousand pages of notes. Our plan was that my dissertation was to be a multivolume tome replacing Allan Nevins’ book, The American States during and after the Revolution (1924), and concluding with the ratification of the Constitution. As things happened it became prudent for me, from considerations of career advancement, to complete my degree in fairly short order rather than in the several years necessary for the projected opus. Mood asked me whether there were some subject that I could write up by skimming it off the top of my notes, as he put it. I told him that I could finish my doctorate with the Beard thesis. In that offhand way was born We The People, finished as a dissertation in 1955, rewritten under the editorial tutelage of Livia Appel, and first published in 1958.

The strategy we decided upon derived from Beard’s own: he had admitted that his work was “frankly fragmentary” and left it for later students to fill in the details: my aim was to do just that, and to determine whether the details and the thesis were compatible. The heart of Beard’s case rested upon the proposition that holders of certain kinds of personal property (“personalty interests,” he called them) were the driving force behind the movement for the Constitution, and that “realty interests” (by which he meant small farmers and debtors) were the backbone of the opposition. Filling in the details would mean compiling economic biographies of all persons directly connected with the drafting and ratification of the document—the fifty-five members of the Constitutional Convention and the 1,750 members of the state ratifying conventions—and comparing proponents and opponents.

In undertaking such a study I was enormously fortunate in my timing—not because the historical profession was ripe to hear what I had to say, but because a changed set of conditions not only made possible the research I did but even made it relatively easy. The new conditions were a revolution in the means of gathering data. One of Beard’s main discoveries, and one that had given his book strong supporting evidence, had been the previously neglected records of dealings in certificates of Revolutionary War debts. These had long lain in the basement of the Treasury Department, dusty, uncatalogued, fragmented, and otherwise difficult to use. Beard remarked in a footnote that some of the records proved useable “only after a vacuum cleaner had been brought in to excavate the ruins,” and that some of the records had been stolen by a janitor and sold for their linen-rag based paper. He commented that, “Unless the Government at Washington follows the example of enlightened administrations in Europe and establishes a Hall of Records, the precious volumes which have come down to us will be worked with great difficulty, if they do not disintegrate and disappear altogether.” His appeal was finally answered upon the creation of the National Archives in the late 1930s, but it was not until after World War II that the holdings in the Archives became readily accessible to many researchers.

It was just then that I happened upon the scene; and the availability of the records had been accompanied by a host of other developments that soon resulted in an explosion of the quantity of information that historians could find out about the American past. Emphasis upon research, generous leave policies, and a proliferation of research grants gave my generation of scholars the incentive, the opportunity, and the wherewithal. In the meantime, primary source materials became far easier to find and use: state archives and historical societies, the Library of Congress, and a number of special libraries collected great quantities of materials, catalogued them, and otherwise made study of them convenient. Travel to the repositories had become easy and cheap, and the development of microfilming and other duplicating techniques, interlibrary loans, and the publishing of many manuscript collections made it possible for me and others to use much of the research materials in our own libraries and homes.

Those conditions no longer exist; the golden age lasted about two decades. In recent years I have had occasion to consult the holdings of four public repositories which I used extensively during the early 1950s—the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Virginia State Library. In each of these, security measures necessitated by vandalism and theft, compounded by bureaucratic regulations adopted apparently only to accommodate the needs and whims of the bureaucrats, have made the research materials as inaccessible as they were in Beard’s time. As conditions of research stand now, it would take thirty years to do the research I did in three, if indeed it could be done at all.

In retrospect, and as I read what I have just written, the venture seems ambitious almost to the point of audacity. That it may have been audacious never occurred to me at the time, despite Beard’s great stature and the nearly universal acceptance of his interpretation; possibly I was too young to know that I should be intimidated by the task. Besides, I expected a favorable reception, for a number of distinguished historians had been kind enough to read and criticize the manuscript, and all had been warm in their praise. On the other hand, there were grounds for uneasiness, since a few historians at the University of Wisconsin, staunch liberals who looked upon Beard as something of a saint, engaged in a surreptitious campaign of bad-mouthing the book, not omitting to circulate some vicious rumors about the author into the bargain.

As it happened, the reviews were overwhelmingly favorable. The pattern was set by one of the first major reviews that appeared. David Potter, an eminent Yale historian, wrote in the prestigious liberal journal Saturday Review that We The People was “one of the most important books on America in recent years,” adding that I had “tumbled a very large Humpty Dumpty from a very high wall of history, and American historical literature will never be entirely the same, despite king’s horses and king’s men.” The New York Times disdained to review the book, but C. Vann Woodward went out of his way to praise it in a Times review of a book on an unrelated subject, and he wrote elsewhere that “No historian will thenceforth embark on a venture of economic interpretation without prayerful contemplation of this work.” There was, as far as I could discern, no ideological bias among the reviewers; Richard M. Weaver lauded it, but so did Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and nearly everyone else. Critics tossed around such terms as “awesome,” “definitive,” and “tour de force.” One former president of the American Historical Association, Robert Livingston Schuyler, went so far as to write a review article which he concluded by saying that “If I am not mistaken, a new star has appeared in the firmament of American historiography.” That was pretty heady stuff for a thirty-one year old.

Only two downright unfavorable reviews appeared, and they were both written by my friend Jackson Turner Main. One was in The Nation; the other was submitted to The William & Mary Quarterly, which agreed to publish it only if I agreed to write a rebuttal, which I did.

Economic determinism as a device for interpreting history suddenly and almost totally went out of fashion in America. With that result I was pleased. I thought the reaction went too far, however, for it seems palpably obvious to me that money and power are inextricably mixed in American political history. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume phrased it in an essay that James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and a host of other Framers echoed, when principled and prudential men set out to make lasting constitutions, “every man ought to be supposed a knave” guided by ambition and avarice, the love of power and the love of money. What I objected to about Beard’s thesis was not its emphasis upon the previously neglected role of economics but its simplistic determinism, its omission of the power factor, and its unwillingness to consider that the Constitution was the work of principled and prudential men.

Yet when I tried to put these matters in perspective in the first of the two sequel volumes that I proposed in the preface to We The People—E Pluribus Unum, published in 1965—the reaction against economic interpretation had been so powerful that many who had praised the former were lukewarm or hostile toward the latter. When I finally completed the trilogy twenty years later, with Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, reviewers were once again as generous as they had been on the first go-round.

I am delighted—and grateful to Russell Kirk and to Irving Louis Horowitz—that We The People is back in print. The original publisher, the University of Chicago Press, kept it available for more than twenty years, most of that time in paperback, but Chicago sold its last copies a few years ago. The present printing is precisely the same as the first. One is tempted to correct the few errors of fact that I have found, but that would be cheating, for I have come to realize, however dimly, that We The People is a document in the history of ideas as well as a historical study.

Forrest McDonald