By William Hogeland, the author of the narrative histories Declaration and The Whiskey Rebellion and a collection of essays, Inventing American History who blogs at http://www.williamhogeland.com. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0
Looking closely at founding-era struggles over finance challenges Tea Party history — and some liberal preconceptions too.
Anything but a lost, halcyon epoch of unity and consensus, our founding era saw deep, harsh oppositions among Americans over what kind of society our independence from England was meant to bring about. Like today, the direst political oppositions devolved on the economy, and on proper uses of public and private finance. From the North Carolina Regulation of the 1760s to the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, Americans struggled mightily with other Americans over economic issues.
Though little-known, those struggles had decisive impacts on all of the famous moments in founding history. The Continental Congress’s adopting the Declaration of Independence occurred in the summer of 1776 only because those among the financial and political elites who wanted American liberty made secret, common cause with radical populists who wanted American equality. The Constitutional Convention’s proposing a national government in 1787 came in direct opposition to progress made by the radical democrats who promoted ordinary, working Americans over the high-finance investing class.
So it’s hardly surprising that those same struggles have critically important echoes and resonances — if sometimes painfully dissonant ones — for our bitterly divided politics and disastrous financial crises today.
Yet despite constant appeals to founding values by politicians and pundits across the political spectrum, a perennial American eagerness to avoid framing our founding period in economic terms can make it strangely difficult to keep those all-important 18th-century finance issues in historical focus. The Tea Party movement, for example, has laid its claim on the founding period, and to a great extent that claim is indeed an economic and financial one. Casting the modern welfare state as a form of tyranny, in large part because of what they see as its excessive taxation, Tea Partiers invoke the famous American resistance to Parliament’s efforts to raise a revenue in the colonies without the consent traditionally given by representation. Seeing founding-generation American patriots as unified against British taxation (and frequently misrepresenting the politics even of the elites they invoke), the Tea Party defines its own anti-government, anti-tax values as essential to American identity.
The Tea Party thus edits out an alternative view of government that prevailed among the ordinary 18th-century Americans who were all-important to achieving independence. Those Americans opposed elites epitomized by the Boston merchant class, which the Tea Party, perhaps appropriately enough, so strongly identifies with. The internal struggle for American equality was as important to the founding as the high-Whig resistance to England, but the Tea Party can’t deal with the populist leaders and militia rank-and-file who wrote the socially radical 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution, or the Shaysites of Massachusetts who marched on the state armory, or the so-called whiskey rebels who inspired federal occupation of western Pennsylvania. American Revolutionary patriots all, those democratic-finance leaders had ideas about government’s role in ensuring economic equality that prefigured programs of the 19th-century Populists and the 20th-century New Dealers, the very programs the Tea Party wants to dismantle. Tea Party history therefore has to expunge the welfare state’s roots in America’s founding.
Liberals, too, can have a problem with the economic conflicts of the founding period. Alexander Hamilton’s national finance program, which Madison and Jefferson opposed with such intensity, was economically regressive. Under the influence of the founding financier Robert Morris, Hamilton made a stunningly successful effort to yoke American wealth to great national projects by beating down the popular-finance movement and promoting the interest (in both senses!) of the high-finance elites. Yet when some of today’s liberals look to Madison for support in critiquing Hamiltonian finance, they come up empty. Madison’s attacks on central banking represented anything but an argument for democracy and economic equality.
In fact, the activist governing philosophy of national power that Hamilton espoused and Madison opposed gave precedent to modern liberal ideas about an energetic federal role in achieving social ends. Hamilton, not Madison, was in that sense the modern liberal, and the Hamiltonian influence on today’s liberal establishment can be seen in the Brookings Institution’s “Hamilton Project” and Peter Orszag’s hanging of a National Gallery portrait of Hamilton in his office. That kind of liberalism makes Hamilton the author of using fervent support for Wall Street in hopes of benefiting Main Street.
There’s another kind of liberal history, leaning economically left, that prefers to trace a pretty straight line from Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson to FDR, incorporating the labor movement along the way. It thus sees democratic, labor-oriented populism as essential to American founding values and coming to fruition throughout American history. In this view, the Declaration’s “all men are created equal” prophesied social progressivism (even if that’s not what the signers meant by it) and the Constitution’s “we the people” prophesied democracy (even if the document was specifically intended to prevent democracy). The Revolution is defined not by the split between, say, Hamilton and Madison but by the emergence of Jeffersonian and then, even more fully, Jacksonian democracy. The American people become in essence social radicals, and the development of social democracy, while embattled, becomes a natural project of America.
One problem with that view lies in its reliance on Jefferson and Jackson as socially progressive. The New Dealers did an amazing job of reinventing Jefferson as one of their own — they built him a monument and carved his face on the nickel and on a mountain; they put a statue of his Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin at the front door of the Treasury (Hamilton, the department’s inventor, stands around out back). But it’s pretty funny to think of Jefferson as a patron saint of federal-government, welfare-state activism, and Jefferson’s attitudes about democracy are notoriously slippery and problematic. The sage of Monticello could wax romantic about small farmers, and he could get excited about radical uprisings (in Paris), but he wasn’t about to invite small farmers up his hill, and giving the proletariat of the American cities access to political power — what Paine actually helped bring about in 1776 — filled him with disgust and horror.
The Jackson era, too, by no means represented a triumph of the kind of economic equality espoused by Paine, Herman Husband, Thomas Young, James Cannon, and the democratic-finance populists of 1760’s and 1770’s. Modern forms of “consensus” history see Madison and Hamilton alike as being superseded by Jackson, who ushered in a rowdy, undeferential, dirty-boots, small-business capitalism, contrasted with the gentility shared by all of the famous founders, no matter their differences. That kind of capitalism was hardly what founding-era democratic-finance activists had in mind. The Jackson administration’s assaults on central banking may be read by social-democracy historians as a dismantling, at last, of the regressiveness of Hamiltonian finance — but what began flourishing in the Jackson era can just as easily be read as fulfilling the diverging fears of those bitter enemies Paine and John Adams. Paine, desiring to re-order the world around a economic equality ensured by strong national government, would have been terribly disappointed by the cutthroat society emerging in Jackson’s America. And Adams’s warnings that democracy could only lead to machines, demagoguery, and party wars over political fiefdoms might as well have been describing the American politics that began with 19th-century democracy.
Just as in Tea Party history, which sees the American people as essentially anti-government, an act of faith is required to see the American people as essentially socially progressive (or essentially anything). Both liberals and conservatives remain riveted — hypnotized! — by the big-name founders, from Madison to Hamilton to Adams to Jefferson to Washington to Franklin (with Paine sometimes thrown in because of “Common Sense,”); they therefore remain locked in a fight over what those founders would or would not have supported today. Widening the lens to include the more ordinary likes of Cannon, Young, Husband, Christopher Marshall, Timothy Matlack, Robert Whitehill, and William Findley, among others who opposed American financial elitism in the Revolutionary era, challenges all sides of today’s political debate. Bearing down on the painful fact that a struggle over money, not ideas, marked every significant moment during the American founding can help enable new thinking about our struggles today.
The founding leaves us with questions about, not answers to, the kind of American economy we want now. In this series I’ve tried to raise some of those questions. This post is my last in the series. Writing it, and reading commentary on it here and around the blogs, has been a great pleasure. Thanks to Lynn Parramore (and to Bryce Covert, New Deal 2.0, and the Roosevelt Institute)! I hope these posts help frame an ongoing conversation about the strangely little-known, yet perennially resonant drama of American founding finance.
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Foundation myths are not to be questioned. But if they are, no-one will pay any heed. The indoctrination will roll merrily on, unabated.
Ah yes, the Tea Party. I’m sure they don’t like taxes but what about the government enforced banking and money cartel that allows them to “tax” the purchasing power of the non-credit-worthy? That’s different, I suppose?
To the most esteemed author of this quite learned post, a grand salute for your series on the Founding Fathers – loved it so much I went out and bought your book “The Whiskey Rebellion”. Read it too! Darn good info. But the trouble is, I’m not in the States anymore and don’t hang out in bars like my younger days so I don’t have much chance of scoring points in political debates quoting revisionist history from New Deal 2.0 and Naked Capitalism bloggers (revisions which, IMHO, are more accurate and more truthful revisions). But there’s always the Internet and replies so here I am.
To dearieme, I just getting too damn old and curmudgeonly, but some of us pay heed and I believe we can change the “rolling merrily on, unabated” tune.
In fact, the Boston Tea Party was a protest against the lowering of the tax on Tea which was the result of lobbying by one of the first corporations, the British East Indies Company, which had a surplus of tea which it wished to dump om the Americans to the detriment of American merchants. While there were protests against the Stamp Act and, after independence there was the Whiskey Rebellion, which were anti-tax in nature, the Boston Tea Party was a protest against a corporation writing legislation. You can count on the ignorance of the Tea Partiers but I aam surprised that this article accepted the prevailing myth.
I had thought the “faux indians” who dumped the tea were actually smugglers who wanted the tax increased. Tax cuts hurt their business model, after all.
Yes, the tea-dumping scheme was a bailout of an imperiled big corporation (Parliament agreed to suspend most of the duties), and the Boston Tea Party was therefore directly anti-corporate.
So today’s miscalled “tea partiers” get this wrong like they get everything else wrong. Anyone who truly wants freedom and prosperity wants to smash corporate power as well as government power.
I wrote about this at greater length here:
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/the-real-tea-party/
The Hogeland series was good.
Point well taken, and I think I my description reflected it adequately (if in broad strokes): “Tea Partiers invoke the famous American resistance to Parliament’s efforts to raise a revenue in the colonies without the consent traditionally given by representation. Seeing founding-generation American patriots as unified against British taxation (and frequently misrepresenting the politics even of the elites they invoke), the Tea Party defines its own anti-government, anti-tax values as essential to American identity.”
An interesting assessment, and I generally agree that the Founders’ views were quite complex and varied, and not easily summarized.
It needs to be pointed out, however, that social democracy ultimately had its roots, not in the American revolutionary state, but in the French revolutionary state. That explains its particular emphasis on class, and its focus on the division between capital and labor; both were key features of Western Europe, but not as prevalent features of the American state, which was dominated by independent farmers and craftsmen (hence, with capital in many if not most instances being owned by labor, and therefore with only vaguely-defined class distinctions, the South being the major exception).
In the founding American state, the route to relief of poverty was not through the state (and it is difficult to believe such a thing would even have been considered), but rather through the frontier. The frontier served as an enabler of the otherwise disempowered, who by way of the homestead acts could secure property, independence, and the means of supporting themselves (all at the expense of Native Americans, of course–but then, redistribution programs are zero-sum and therefore always come at a cost to someone else). That “outlet” consistently relieved pressure on the impoverished areas of the East and the South, which would go a long way toward explaining why socialism gained little traction in the 19th Century. Only in the 20th Century, with the last of the frontier exhausted, could socialist tendencies, in the form of social progressivism, gain traction. When Steinbeck’s Joad family goes west in the California of the 1930’s, they find an oppressive class state; had they gone west just fifty years earlier, they would have found open land and opportunity.
(On an unrelated note, I have made this point before, but will make it again: its protestations to the contrary, the modern day “Tea Party” movement is not so interested in returning to the austere independence of the founding era as they are in returning to the comfortable affluence of the 1990’s–when jobs were plentiful, benefits were secure, consumer goods were cheap and abundant, gas was $2/gallon, and assets did nothing but go up in value. That such an era was completely unsustainable, and that we would eventually pay a heavy price for such profligacy, is a message neither they nor their multitudinous critics seem interested in hearing.)
… That such an era was completely unsustainable, and that we would eventually pay a heavy price for such profligacy, is a message neither they nor their multitudinous critics seem interested in hearing.) Peripheral Visionary
If not for the debt incurred to the counterfeiting and usury cartel, who’s to say what is sustainable? The boom was to a certain extent artificial but certainly some real growth occurred too. And now during the bust some real and unnecessary destruction is occurring.
To speak of a “heavy price” implies that it is actually possible to borrow from the future. But except for money and other financial instruments that is impossible. Existing resources are either put to use or they are not. So why is money borrowing necessary? It isn’t.
Peripheral Visionary said: “Only in the 20th Century, with the last of the frontier exhausted, could socialist tendencies, in the form of social progressivism, gain traction.”
Only someone with Leninist training and ideological convictions could make such a statement.
Completely missing from this historical (or should I say hysterical) account is the vast technological frontier opening up to the United States at this very moment: oil, the automobile, the airplane, radio, etc. In the tradition of Lenin, a rational, non-ideological economic development of the country together with the potentialities of new institutions for freedom are surrendered on the altar of ideological conceits. Politically, freedom becomes a casualty of economic necessity, the economic necessity itself created by the exercise of the ideology. What we have from Peripheral Visionary is pure, unadulterated Marxist-Leninism.
Well, I think that’s the first time I have been accused of being a Marxist-Leninist!
My point was simply that the frontier–physical, or as you noted, technological–provided an outlet that prevented stultifying social structures from developing. Class structures have always been much less distinct in the U.S. as a result, which is why Marxism-Leninism never gained much traction.
Along those lines, the solution, in my view, to retaining the open social structure of the U.S., as well as economic opportunity, is keeping open avenues to individual empowerment. In that past, that was the physical frontier and the homestead acts; in our day and age, it has been technology, as you noted, but also entrepreneurial opportunities. The latter will also provide a continuing source of competition to established business and political interests, and thus represents a critical component of the dynamism that has the potential of making the U.S. a land of opportunity.
The only way to “individual empowerment,” sans the productivity gains realized through technological advances, is through the enslavement and/or impoverishment of someone else. The Greeks knew this. Marx knew this. Unfortunately Marx, and his pupil Lenin, were so committed to Marx’s ideology—-that poverty is to be solved through political means, through socialization and socialism—-that the solution available through technical means was declared off-limits.
So instead of pursuing the technological solution to the social question, Lenin invoked what Tocqueville called “the doctrine of necessity.” Tocqueville wondered why “the doctrine of necessity…is so attractive to those who write history in democratic ages,” but his recognition and acknowledgement of it did not immunize him from its allure. Even though necessity was completely absent from the range of experiences of either the American Revolution or American egalitarian society, he read the necessity which he knew from the French Revolution into American society.
And you resorted to the same sort of defeatist distortion in your comment, and not just once, but twice. The first time you did it was the instance I have already mentioned. The second time you did it is in your concluding remarks when you wrote:
…the modern day “Tea Party” movement is not so interested in returning to the austere independence of the founding era as they are in returning to the comfortable affluence of the 1990’s–when jobs were plentiful, benefits were secure, consumer goods were cheap and abundant, gas was $2/gallon, and assets did nothing but go up in value. That such an era was completely unsustainable, and that we would eventually pay a heavy price for such profligacy, is a message neither they nor their multitudinous critics seem interested in hearing.
The founding era was hardly “austere.” Both the Puritans and the Jeffersonians attributed America’s boundless prosperity primarily to a divine providence which, as Jefferson observed, “led our forefathers, as Israel of old, out of their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.”
And one of the many characteristics the ideology of the Austerians shares with that of Lenin is that “the doctrine of necessity” becomes self-fulfilling when the ideology is implemented.
Quibble “The founding era was hardly “austere.” Both the Puritans and the Jeffersonians attributed America’s boundless prosperity primarily to a divine providence which, as Jefferson observed, “led our forefathers, as Israel of old, out of their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.”
Skip here…America was the last Northern Continent of preferable latitude colonized. Ideology had little to do with it.
Skippy…How would the fore fathers / framers fared on Greenland[?], why does the classical mind always attribute success to its own rote and fail to take in the entirety of its components.
Unfortunately Marx, and his pupil Lenin, were so committed to Marx’s ideology—-that poverty is to be solved through political means, through socialization and socialism—-that the solution available through technical means was declared off-limits.
You are completely wrong in your understanding of this issue. Contrary to your claims Marx doctrine was completely technologically bound: his main idea is that social organization is implicitly determined by the technological infrastructure and that technological progress drives social changes. Based on this assumption he (incorrectly) predicted that at a certain stage technological progress will make capitalism obsolete and brings a new social organization which does not required for functioning existence of private property. And that this revolution will also bring “proletariat” political power.
Lenin on the contrary considered that a totalitarian party (and Bolsheviks were one of the first if no the first totalitarian party) can lift country from feudal or early capitalism stage (bootstrapping) to the level necessary according to Marx to convert country to socialism and there is no need to wait until the level of technology develops in particular country (according to Marx Russian was not “ready” for socialism due to technological backwardness)
Thus such a party can use capitalists to help to build industrial infrastructure which later will make capitalists redundant as Marx taught. So in way he was anti-Marxist and Leninism is not equal to Marxism: its a different although partially based on Marxism social theory.
What is interesting is that he actually was the author of “Chinese way of development” when state and party (which are merged in totalitarian state) control the commanding height of the economy, but allow at lower level foreign capitalists activity that industrialises the country. Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy(NEP) for the purpose of bringing Russia, hitherto still undeveloped industrially, into the advanced stage of industrial development required as the prerequisite for building socialism, and opened the new Soviet state to foreign capital, fist of all American capital. Actually he actively invited US capitalists to rebuild Russian industrial infrastructure in order to overcome the devastation caused by civil war. This policy was later abolished by Stalin.
kievite,
I will concede that my choice of words was poor when I said “the solution available through technical means was declared off-limits,” because it makes it sound as if the collapse of Russian industry was deliberate. A much better choice of words would have been to simply state that “the solution available through technical means collapsed.” What happened was that technology became a casualty of the rigid application of Marxist-Leninist ideology. But while I acknowledge my misstatement, this nevertheless does not give license for you to launch into your historical fantasy in which the application of Marxist-Leninist ideology played no role in the industrial collapse of the country.
I find it interesting that in your telling you completely omit the period between October 1917, when the Bolsheviks took power, and March 1921, when Lenin announced the NEP. Thus you are able to make statements like the following, as if the implementation of Marxist-Leninist policies played no role in the industrial collapse of the country:
Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy(NEP) for the purpose of bringing Russia, hitherto still undeveloped industrially, into the advanced stage of industrial development required as the prerequisite for building socialism, and opened the new Soviet state to foreign capital, fist of all American capital. Actually he actively invited US capitalists to rebuild Russian industrial infrastructure in order to overcome the devastation caused by civil war. This policy was later abolished by Stalin.
So, according to you, Russia’s lack of industrial capacity was due to 1) the fact it was “still undeveloped industrially” and 2) “the devastation caused by civil war.”
Now compare your historical (or should I call it hysterical) account to that of Victor Arwas, writing in The Great Russian Utopia:
The Civil War and famine had broken up many families, as had government undermining of family life, in which differences between parents and children had been encouraged, with children indoctrinated in Bolshevik ideology through their membership of the Komsomol youth organization. Children who denounced their parents were rewarded. Children abandoned by their parents, runaways, orphans of the war or famine, soon banded together in terrifying gangs which roamed the countryside, threatening, robbing and murdering all who stood in their way. Known as Bezprizornye, they were hunted down by local militias and the army, which frequently machine-gunned the more violent of these groups. The collapse of the industrial infrastructure of the country followed, caused by the war, expropriations, nationalization and outright confiscation, as well as the destruction of several harvests. In March 1921, Lenin announced a New Economic Policy, allowing a partial return to a mixed economy, with some private enterprise, foreign trade permitted and foreign capital welcomed, food levies in rural areas at fixed prices abandoned, and wages allowed to be based on output and ability. In the meantime, the country was largely dependent on international aid, coordinated by Herbert Hoover, later elected President of the United States. In the years that followed the economy recovered enough for the country to concentrate on rebuilding. All power and all decision-making remained centralized.
So the fact is that Lenin didn’t come to the conclusion, as you put it, that “a party can use capitalists to help to build industrial infrastructure,” until after his Marxist-Leninist policies had completely decimated the industrial and agricultural capacity of the country. And the soviets, or what I called “the potentialities of new institutions for freedom” in my original comment, and which were originally celebrated by Lenin, were sacrificed by Lenin (with exactly the same methods that Robespierre used to emasculate and pervert the sociétés populaires) in favor of the Bolshevik party, this justified by necessity, necessity created because a rational, non-ideological economic development of the country fell victim to a quasi-religious implementation of Marxist-Leninist policies. Freedom therefore became a casualty of Marxist-Leninist ideology. This sequence of events is what I see potentially playing out with Austerianism, with both productive capacity and freedom being sacrificed on the altar of ideology. It is a tortuous logic.
As to your claims regarding Marx’s doctrine, you must be speaking of the Marxist ideology that existed prior to his writing of the Communist Manifesto. What Marx learned from the French revolution is that, as Hannah Arendt put it, “poverty can be a political force of the first order.” So in Marx’s early thought necessity served as the engine of revolution, and from revolution evolved freedom. All this was to change in Marx’s later thought. As Arendt comments in On Revolution:
[A]lmost all of his writings after the ‘Communist Manifesto’, redefined the truly revolutionary élan of his youth in economic terms. While he had first seen manmade violence and oppression by man where others had believed in some necessity inherent in the human condition, he later saw the iron laws of historical necessity lurking behind every violence, transgression, and violation… Thus the role of revolution was no longer to liberate men from the oppression of their fellow men, let alone to found freedom, but to liberate the life process of society from the fetters of scarcity so that it could swell into a stream of abundance. Not freedom but abundance became now the aim of revolution.
So did Marx and Lenin believe that technological advance was the key to alleviating the social problem?
For Marx, with the fixation on “the doctrine of necessity” in his later thought, or as Arendt put it “the iron laws of historical necessity,” I find this difficult to believe. Since, according to Marx’s thought, poverty is necessary to provoke revolution, and the implementation of his socialist ideals, it seems like Marx’s thought became obsessed with a historical determinism that yielded poverty so that his revolution could come riding to the rescue.
As to Lenin, regardless of what his declared intent was, it was the implementation of his Marxist-Leninist agenda that was largely responsible for the industrial collapse of the country, which created an acute level of necessity, which was then used to justify a totalitarian state. Or as Arendt put it, “when he sacrificed the new institutions of freedom, the soviets, to the party which he thought would liberate the poor, his motivation and reasoning were still in accord with the tragic failures of the French revolutionary tradition” which had informed Marx’s thought.
How anyone could fail to see the obvious parallels between the Marxist-Leninists and the Austerians (without even delving into the underlying philosophy they both share—-Fitcheanism) is beyond me.
kievite,
I must admit, being sandwiched between you and Peripheral Visionary, I feel like Noam Chomsky’s experience which he described in the documentary film Human Resources (beginning at minute 00:31:40):
The Lenonist system was one of the greatest blows that socialism suffered in the 20th century, maybe second only to fascism. As Lenin took power, one of his first acts along the Trotskians was to destroy the socialist institutions that had arisen in the pre-Bolshevik period—-soviets, factory councils, constituent assembly which was dominated by left social revolutionaries, largely peasant based. And of course they went to war against the anarchists, a major war to try to wipe them out.
[….]
When the Soviet Union collapsed, I actually wrote an article saying this was a victory for socialism, a small victory for socialism. I just couldn’t get it published. Nobody knew what I was talking about. The world’s two major propaganda systems, the West and the Soviet Union, they both decided, determined to use the word socialism to refer to the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union. The West did it to discredit socialism. The Bolsheviks did it to try to gain the credit associated with genuine socialism. What when the world’s two grand propaganda systems agree, it’s going to be very hard for people to extricate themselves from it. So now socialism, the term has been degrade to mean the form of totalitarianism instituted by Lenin and carried out by Stalin.
Oops!
Let’s try that link again:
Human Resources
Wow. Here in a nutshell is the classic interpretation from which my work (in the “Founding Finance” series and elsewhere) is precisely intended to dissent: “… social democracy ultimately had its roots, not in the American revolutionary state, but in the French revolutionary state. That explains its particular emphasis on class, and its focus on the division between capital and labor; both were key features of Western Europe, but not as prevalent features of the American state, which was dominated by independent farmers and craftsmen (hence, with capital in many if not most instances being owned by labor, and therefore with only vaguely-defined class distinctions, the South being the major exception). … In the founding American state, the route to relief of poverty was not through the state (and it is difficult to believe such a thing would even have been considered), but rather through the frontier.”
I think looking realistically at finance in the founding period flips that whole thing around. For better and worse, the French revolutionary state had roots in the Pennsylvania revolutionary state. That’s not me, it’s the historians who despise the Pennsylvania revolutionary state (Samuel Eliot Morison, for one) and blast it in part by tracing the Terror back to it. Homegrown American ideas of social democracy, coming to fruition in 1776 Pennsylvania, contradict the assertion that relief of poverty through the state would not have been considered in America. (Thomas Young, one of the authors of the PA constitution, was a real dictatorship-of-the-proletariat guy; he wanted to limit, *in that constitution*, how much property any one person could own in PA!) Those ideas had roots in 17th C. Levelling and other English efforts, some of them evangelical and mystical, as well as in working-class riffs on the upscale Whig liberty philosophy. And they existed in opposition to what became the American state in 1787, in which people as generally opposed as Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams concurred, for class reasons that were by no means vague to them, as they made unabashedly clear.
Well before the final, deliberate shifting of wealth from small operators to high finance that marked Morris-Hamilton finance (not effectively counteracted by Jeffersonian finance, or even by Jacksonian), a grim American financial landscape of foreclosure crises, specie shortages, predatory lending, government cronyism, etc., was perennially protested by those who were un – and under-enfranchised via their dearth of property. Those people sought, specifically, legislative relief via paper emissions, land banks, anti-monopoly rules, etc.. Little-hymned leaders from Paine (little hymned on this!) to Young to Husband to Findley brought that protest — which the upscale condemned as “democracy” — to the Revolutionary moment, in collaboration with and direct opposition to the famous founders, with highly problematic results, for them and, more importantly, for us.
Regarding the frontier, east-west economic struggles in trans-Appalachian Pennsylvania and western Virginia, as well as the stories of the Great Lakes land companies, among other things, darken and complicate the familiar “pressure relief” homesteading story. “Only in the 20th Century, with the last of the frontier exhausted, could socialist tendencies, in the form of social progressivism, gain traction.” That’s what people say. I’m saying something totally different. Social progressivism gained traction in the 18th century and was stomped. When it came back, many things had changed, and what leftists call class struggle could appear (to many) radically opposed to, or at best marginal and largely irrelevant to, founding American values. (The Tea Party thinks “opposed”; liberal historians think “marginal.”)
To look at things this way does not require a sentimental, academic lefty-liberal faith that the American people are really, essentially socially progressive, that the “real American” canon should elevate Paine and throw out Adams, say. Admitting Thomas Young existed doesn’t require embracing his point of view. A close look at the economic issues, rather than the philosphical ones, that prevailed in 18th C. America suggests that our founding was defined by a clash among Americans over public and private finance, over the proper role of governments in markets, and over democracy, never resolved, wholly denied by the familiar mindset summed up in the comment (though rarely so deftly), and therefore a constant political and cultural plague to us today. If we’re not going to just roll merrily along, as another commenter has it, we might want to consider changing that.
Is France vying to realize herself as ‘the first daughter of the church’? Wasn’t that why Sarkozy supports Draghi for ECB head?
Or can we divorce the church from the faith of money?
Economically speaking: the Glorious Revolution brought corporate power to the front, correct? Is the corporate now vying against the church? Is wallstreet used rhetorically as a euphemism for corporate interest?
Hamlet:
I did love you once.
Ophelia:
Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
Hamlet:
You should not have believ’d me, for virtue cannot so
inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I lov’d you not.
Ophelia:
I was the more deceiv’d.
Hamlet:
Get thee to a nunn’ry, why woulds’t thou be a breeder of
sinners?
Hamlet Act 3, scene 1, 114–121
William Hogeland said: “America suggests that our founding was defined by a clash among Americans over public and private finance, over the proper role of governments in markets, and over democracy, never resolved, wholly denied by the familiar mindset summed up in the comment (though rarely so deftly), and therefore a constant political and cultural plague to us today.”
What you consider to be “a constant political and cultural plague,” others consider to be a blessing. Several of the Founding Fathers were students of the Renaissance and the original Western tradition, before the advent of the Counter-Renaissance of the 17th century. So in some areas it was the philosophy of Montaigne, as opposed to that of Descartes and Newton, that was to prevail:
[T]he political philosophy which underlies our Constitution is characterized by a shrewd awareness of the potential conflicts of power and passion in every community. It knows nothing of a simple harmony in society, analogous to the alleged reciprocity of the free market.
[….]
The significant development is that here, no less than in Europe, a democratic political community has had enough virtue and honesty to disprove the Marxist indictment that government is merely the instrument of privileged classes. It has established sufficient justice to prevent the outbreak of the social resentments which have wrecked the less healthy European nations and have created social acerbities exceeding our own in the best of them.
We have, in short, achieved such justice as we possess in the only way justice can be achieved in a technical society: we have equilibrated power. We have attained a certain equilibrium in economic society itself by setting organized power against organized power. When that did not suffice we used the more broadly based political power to redress disproportions and disbalances in economic society.
What has become of our social peace in this contest of power? The acrimonies of party strife are considerable among us. The absence of collectivist or revolutionary ideology among the workers does not save them from charges of being revolutionaries. Yet the business community accepts the general development of democracy in America with a certain degree of practical grace even while it wars against it ideologically.
▬Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History,1952
Well, that sure worked out.
An important issue and associated myth not addressed by Mr. Hogeland is slavery. The myth is that the founders believed slavery had a limited future and would eventually disappear. Accordingly, the Constitution was left unfinished.
In fact William Lloyd Garrison recognized that the Constitution locked in slavery. For denouncing the Constitution he was almost tarred and feathered by a mob in Boston. The Constitution was a compromise that insured that congress could never abolish slavery through legislation. In return for allowing slavery the financial elites got the powerful central government they wished the country to have while the slaveholders received what they wanted.
This deal with devil to make the US a more perfect Union, was continued after the resolution of the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery. Not only the founding fathers, but even Ole Hickory Jackson of muddy boots fame, was a practitioner of the Aw Shucks, “I’m just an old soldier born on a farm’ myth spinning. “WHO RULES AMERICA?” WILLIAM DOMHOFF P 168.
“He dealt in slaves, made hundreds of $1000s, accumulated hundreds of thousands of valuable acres in land speculation, owned racehorses and racetracks, bought cotton gins, distilleries, and plantations, was a successful merchant , and married extremely well.” Enough to make even Robert Morris green with envy AND captured the White house with his wealth and reputation.
So the wealthy of the North and the South were not about to relinquish state power to those less wealthy them, in order to use it as a mechanism for wealth distribution. People would have to organize in large numbers to overcome the obstacles to control state power, placed out of their grasp by the stacking of the deck by voter disenfranchisement, what we call today, voter suppression.
After the Civil War, as Northern wealth exploded with Industrialization, so did labor agitation. Down south, Black power overwhelmed the state legislatures and invaded the National Capital with elected Congressmen and Senators.
“THE DEATH OF RECONSTRUCTION”, BY HEATHER COX RICHARDSON, recalls the struggle of the vanquished Southern landed gentry to overcome a second defeat by Black voting power. In an effort to reclaim a dominant political position and prevent an advancing economic clout of Black workers, farmers, and businesses, the Southern and Northern wealthy elites came to an accommodation to suppress both perceived threats coming from their respective labor pools.
“In the years after the Civil War, mainstream Northerners increasingly perceived the mass of African-Americans as adherents of a theory of political economy in which labor and capital were at odds and in which a growing government would be used to advance laborers at the expense capitalists. For these Northerners, the majority of ex-slaves became the face of ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’ as opponents dubbed this view of political economy.” p. 244-245.
Furthermore, throughout the south, “new suffrage restrictions curtailed white voting as well as black. When Louisiana’s new voting law went into effect on Jan 1, 1898, only 9.5% of African-American and 46.6% of whites were registered to vote. A year before, THE NUMBERS HAD BEEN 95.6% OF AFRICAN AMERICANS AND 103.2% OF WHITES. Similar laws in the North guaranteed that the government was purged of those who would subvert it.” P.224
“When Louisiana’s new voting law went into effect on Jan 1, 1898, only 9.5% of African-American and 46.6% of whites were registered to vote. A year before, THE NUMBERS HAD BEEN 95.6% OF AFRICAN AMERICANS AND 103.2% OF WHITES. Similar laws in the North guaranteed that the government was purged of those who would subvert it.” P.224
HC Richardson utterly omits to say “of African American MALES” and “of white MALES.”
HELLOOOoooo
103.2% (of whites) were registered to vote? Now that’s democracy! If a vote for every person is good, then more than one vote is surely better.
Carla, dial down on the estrogen, your inner Judith Butler is showing.
Although it’s not clearly one of Mr. Hogeland’s themes, his research and writing makes complete hash of “originalism” as a viable — or even intelligible — approach to constitutional adjudication. When Justice Scalia and his ilk demand that the Constitution be interpreted in conformity with “original intent” of the “founders,” the question for him is, “Which founder? Whose intent?”
“Whose founder? Whose intent?”
Oh, please, like you could crumble Scalia’s entire Nostalgism theory of society and governance with just two questions composed of four words…
Oh, wait, I guess you just did. Never mind.
“Just as in Tea Party history”…
Perhaps you meant to say ‘Just as in the Tea Party narrative’? I found the article very informative on the subject of created political narratives. The article itself was a form of meta-narrative on the populist-elite polarity. Narratives are an essential ingredient of political propaganda and history, but I think it’s important to distinguish between the two. As you have pointed out here, political narratives don’t care so much about real history, but instead look to the past and selectively interpret events for today’s political purposes.
Mr. Hogeland,
Excellent piece, thanks!
Mr. Hogeland, I have appreciated your series and found this concluding piece to be especially profound. The series as clarified some of the perplexing inconsistencies I have found by those who co-opt history for political purposes. Many Thanks.
History seems to be a messy affair.
Historican seem to use mostly inference without a stable historical record to infer from.
If one eliminates such theoretical props as “historical laws” or “historical causes” the historians job seems to largely consist of weaving ever new patterns of interrelationships between the events themselves, which never seem to receive a conclusive confirmation or collaboration.
It may well be that the historical materials out of which coherence is generated acquire their character as relevant material based on the antecedent judgments of the historian and in no way are ever completely, independently confirmed.
As Hogeland indicates, “the founding fathers leave us with questions about, not answers to, the kind of American economcy we want now.”
All of us, including historians, find these answers based on our normative readings(something which is not generally acknowledged).
History, it seems, is largely prescription not description.
Thanks for your normative vision.
“So it’s hardly surprising that those same struggles have critically important echoes and resonances — if sometimes painfully dissonant ones — for our bitterly divided politics and disastrous financial crises today.”
Everyone is concentrating on the melody line and ignoring the treble clef. It is religion herself that implements design upon the planet. If the slate is wiped clean, let’s leave it that way.
Or, like schoolchildren, we can continue to argue over stories.
Now, who crossed the Delaware?
OOOh, OOOOh, OOOOh.
Yes, Cleetus?
It’d be George Washin-yuan.
Good, Cleetus. Good.
Mizz. Humpfree? George be dead.
Yes, Abigail. He died a long time ago, but his example is set before us as a path of light and truth.
He be under-the-grownd, fursure. Ain’t left no footprints. I be thinkin’ it’s all fudge.
Well, Abigail. That’s because you’re contrary.
No’m. That’a-be becuz I ain’t buyin’ popcorn in the inter-miss-shun of the play, “Dumb and dumber.”
It’s sort of like the emperor is wandering around buck-ass-naked and we all are arguing over the color of his socks.
Thanks for the laughs.
Skippy…it is said that god visits foxholes, wheres in my experience its a load in ones pants, body’s mind trying to tell you something is horribly wrong about the situation. Yet there are those that say its time to repent for past sins[!], all whilst one is committing the greatest sin in others name[s[!], Cult of the Father where on cannot choose their family, unable too separate, coercion of DNAs purpose.
Just skipping stones, Skippy. Just skipping stones…
http://www.faithofourfathers.net/carroll.html
Dawn’s comin’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQfM2JUYnpc
Anonymous comments lifted from ND2.0 re: “Bretton Woods, the New Deal and the Great Society — circa 1776”
========================================
William,
I’m shocked, shocked!
“Investors everywhere in America relied on the bank for gigantic, poorly secured loans to fund their speculations in the land bubble…”
A bank causing bubblicious inflation and enriching the wealthy, say it ain’t so?
So, is this why modern Keynesians so rabidly defend central banks? To enrich the wealthy (Bernanke is certainly fulfilling that role well by pumping liquidity to Wall Street and destroying the savings of the elderly)?
It seems modern Keynesians forgot John Maynard himself-
“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens… if a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.”