Re: Beard's thesis
Re: Beard's thesis
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 19:05:30 -0600
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 12:13:26 -0500 (EST)
From: "J. Douglas Deal" <
deal@Oswego.EDU
>
Subject: Re: Beard's thesis
Probably the best single essay that both summarizes Beardian arguments
and indicates how more recent scholarship has moved beyond Beardian
sorts of questions is Alfred Young, "American Historians Confront 'The
Transforming Hand of Revolution'" in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J.
Albert, eds., _The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the
American Revolution as a Social Movement_ (Charlottesville, 1995),
346-492.
Doug Deal
History/SUNY-Oswego
Re: Beard's thesis
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 23:41:17 -0600
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 23:29:14 CST
From: "Dan Smith[
dansmith@uic.edu
] "<
U09183@UICVM.UIC.EDU
>
Subject: Charles Beard on the Constitution
Beard on the Constitution: Ignored or Transcended, not Refuted
Grover Furr recently inquired about the status of Beard's economic
interpretation of the Constitution of 1787. My summary of the
historiography is that Beard has been ignored or transcended, depending
on your temperament, rather than refuted.
By a generous reading, Beard operationalized his materialist or class
interpretation with data on the kinds of property held by
individuals--self-interest narrowly defined. The works of Jackson
Turner Main and most directly on the delegates at Philadelphia
themselves by Robert McGuire and Robert L. Ohsfeldt, "An Economic Model
of Voting Behavior over Specific Issues at the Constitutional
Convention of 1787," (JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY, 46 (March 1986),
79-111), show that proponents and opponents of a stronger national
government in larger, economically-complex states that were closely
divided split substantially on the basis of predictors of the interests
of constituents. Locales better connected to the international market
("commercial-cosmopolitan" in Main's terms) favored the new
Constitution, whereas more isolated areas ("agrarian- localist")
opposed it, as the new government promised few services and threatened
more control and taxes. Both studies detected a lesser effect of the
characteristics of individual delegates on their position on the
Constitution.
Arguably there is also a political dimension, represented by James
Madison, that originated in reaction to the irresponsible behavior of
state legislatures during the 1780s, which centers on the question of
ensuring leadership by the natural aristocracy. Of course, when
Madison realized in the early 1790s that the issue was who benefited
and who did not, he led/followed his Virginia constituents into
opposition to Hamilton's program. In sum, an emphasis on the current
and projected economic circumstances of constituencies represents my
revised "Beardian" view
I do not regard this updating of Beard to be inconsistent with
treatments such as that by Gordon Wood in his proto-post-modernist
CREATION OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. Intellectual historians have been
quite successful in severing politics from political history; hence
Beard, Main, et al. are ignored or transcended, depending on your
perspective. I generally prefer embodied contexts over disembodied
texts, not to mention discourses, but admit that alternative
perspectivese can be enlightening.
Daniel Scott Smith, History, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Beard's thesis
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 1998 16:43:25 -0600
Date: Tue, 03 Mar 1998 12:34:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: Grover Furr <
FURRG@alpha.montclair.edu
>
Subject: Beard's _Economic Interpretation_
I would like to ask the learned members of this list about the
specific thesis of Charles A. Beard's famous volume, "An economic
interpretation of the Constitution of the United States".
I know the book is very old, and that Forrest McDonald wrote his
critique of it, _We The People_, many years ago now too.
Is there any work which might be said to sum up, or even move
forward, this issue, which, as I see it, is the question of who
benefitted from the Revolution itself and the post-Revolution
arrangements made by the government?
If there is a good, recent, scholarly review article, or even
monograph, I'd like to learn of it.
Finally, I'd appreciate learning what listmembers think about
Beard's thesis and evidence.
Sincerely,
Grover C. Furr
English Department | Phone: (201) 655-7305
Montclair State University | email:
Upper Montclair, NJ 07043 |
furrg@alpha.montclair.edu
"When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I
asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist."
--Dom Helder Camara
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Beard's thesis
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 11:47:22 -0600
Date: Mon, 09 Mar 1998 09:31:09 -0500
From: Saul Cornell <
cornell.14@osu.edu
>
As far as the Beard thesis goes one problem is that we do not have a
study that went back to the mss tax lists to test Beard's claims. In
grad school I did a project on Pennsylvania and found that the
published tax lists used by most scholarship were filled with errors
and omissions. Of course even with better data the categories used by
Beard seem too simplistic to capture the complexity of ratification.
Even Jack Main's important study raises interesting questions about how
data is coded. To take just one example, much of his information about
economic ideology comes from the debate over the Bank in Pennsylvania.
Gordon Wood's reading of that debate is quite different. If one
re-coded the materials to reflect Wood's interpretation then a rather
different picture of these proto Anti-Federalists would emerge.
Beard's thesis
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 12:13:51 -0600
From:
appleby@history.ucla.edu
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 09:59:14 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Beard's thesis
Bracketing for the purpose of discussing whether or not Beard's thesis
has been refuted, I think it is important to consider the conceptual
advance on it made by Jackson Turner Main. By dividing groups along
the cosmopolitan/localist axis, he made it possible to merge culture
and economic interest. Living in a city involved men and women with
experiences they would never have had in the country and subtly changed
the way they looked at the world AND connected their interests to it.
Self-interest is not a culturally neutral concept. We consider our
interests from within the cultural perspective that has already
structured our experience. Joyce