Madison, the Revolution and the Constitution

Andrew Jackson fought in the Revolution, so he counts as a Founder, too

Our Blue Voice partner Dave mentioned James Madison in a recent post, which got me thinking in political-sciency terms about the American Revolution. Which is, after all, the event we're celebrating today. The point of Dave's post was to take issue with knee-jerk patriotism that automatically assumes, like the Judge Samuel did for ancient Israel, that the US is something more than "one of the nations".

And I don't want to step on that main point of his. The arrogance of assuming that we're "the greatest country in the world" can lead to things like like the disaster we know as the Iraq War. I've been saying this for years, but one day I'm going to spend a few days time in a university library somewhere and try to run down the first time that a President used the phrase "the greatest country in the world" to describe the United States. It's not exactly a humble claim.

I know it goes back at least to Jimmy Carter. I've never encountered it from even Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt during the two World Wars. I'm guessing it started around the bicentennial celebrations of 1976, but I haven't seen a Jerry Ford example yet.

But I do want to say a good word for that veteran revolutionary James Madison.

Dave's post alluded to a statement of Madison's at the Constitutional Convention that he understood to mean that Madison was endorsing the rule of an oligarchy under the Constitutional government they were designing. But his famous definition of the state in general in Federalist #10 is a more clear statement of his position. In that essay, Madison focused on the need for a meaningful balance between majority rule and minority rights. Or, in the particular terms which he used there, the dangers that a democracy can be destroyed by "the violence of faction", as the common body of knowledge among the Founders' generation told them had occurred in ancient Athens and the Roman Republic. The point of having institutional checks and balances among the three Constitutional Branches, of federalism, and of staggered election periods (e.g., only a third of the Senate was to replaced every two years) was to prevent a slim antidemocratic majority grabbing power in some period of crisis or panic and abolishing basic institutions of democracy.

Madison makes it clear, though, that the point of democratic government is that various "factions" need to have a public voice and have representation in government, not dependent on the whim of an entreched hereditary monarchy:

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government. (my emphasis)

Where we're used to hearing endless Republican whining about the insidious influence of "special interests" (by which they mean unions and consumer groups and environmentals, not business lobbyists), it doesn't necessarily jump out at us from Madison's words that he was articulating a revolutionary-democratic understanding of politics and the state, recognizing that economic interests and social classes produced parties and other political factions. And that it was the legitimate business of democratic government to take those varied interests into account.

Political science geeks may notice a striking similarity between Madison's word's and the theory of politics articulated by Karl Marx and his adherents. This is not imaginary. But since Madison had not only written this essay and served two terms as President before Marx was born, in 1818 in far-oft German (Prussian) city of Trier, almost four decades after the publication of Federalist #10, it would be more accurate to say that Marx adopted a Madisonian view of the origin of political parties. Madison's more conservative contemporaries would have preferred to describe parties and factions in terms of more abstract categories of ideas and beliefs.

There's no doubt that the American Revolution was a businessman's revolution. But it was no less a revolution because of that. Since we're speaking of Marxists, it's worth noting that the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin called the American Revolutionary War, "one of those great ... really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few."

The American revolutinaries weren't revolting against a feudal class, like the contemporary French Revolution which was still underway at the time the US Constitution was written, debated and adopted, or Oliver Cromwell's Puritan revolution in England in the preceding century. But the English colonial system in America was a feudal element that was overthrown by the American Revolution. And the Revolution was also a war for national freedom, that established the United States as a distinct nation.

The leaders in the Revolution were largely merchants and other businesspeople. And the majority of the country were farmers, who operated in a capitalist farming environment rather than a feudal system. As in England and France, the ideas of "liberalism" (in the sense of Adam Smith, whose book The Wealth of Nations also appeared in 1776) and democracy found their main champions among businesspeople. There were also free artisans, endentured servants and slaves in the colonies in 1776. But factories were limited and employed a small number of people. An industrial working class existed only in embryo at that time.

The Progressive historian Charles Beard wrote a famous history, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, that looked at the personal wealth and business interests of the members of the Constitutional Convention and argued that they had their eye on their personal benefit in designing the Constitution. They portrayed the Constitution as a reactionary move primarily aimed at benefitting the wealthy against the common people. This is the capsule description of Beard's approach from the 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica:

He then developed a schema of historical explanation that found its most famous expression in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). In this book he claimed that the Constitution had been formulated by interest groups whose motivations were just as much personal financial ones as they were political ones. Although American politicians were generally outraged at the implications of material interests embodied in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers, the book was received by academicians as an innovative study on motivational factors among socioeconomic groups. In The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915), Beard placed somewhat more emphasis on the philosophical context of political struggles, but he nevertheless reaffirmed his view of the importance of economic interests in governmental action.

This is a good example of why the Progressive movement, which represented a middle-class idealism that was at least as suspicious of unions and urban workers as it was of the business "trusts", has always been hard for me to grasp or sympathize with. But I can grasp Beard's particular twist on the Constitution, which misinterprets the political battles over the Constitution and winds up promoting a cynical, conservative, "everybody's in it for a buck" attitude.

How many revolutionary leaders ever supported a revolution because they thought they were going to be personally damaged by it in the end? Yes, the men at the Constitution Convention were well-off and were interested in protecting the status of themselves and others like themselves. But they also took their role as political leaders and American patriots seriously. They weren't trying to reverse the Revolution, they were trying to institutionalize it.

The opposition to the Constitution was in part from people who were worried that a stronger central government would threaten personal freedoms. But there was also a great deal of conservative opposition, also including businessmen who thought they might personally benefit from retaining the Confederation arrangement. In today's terms, the Federalist Party was the first "conservative" party and developed from the pro-Constitution movement. And Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party was the "liberal" party and developed from the anti-Constitution movement. But while that is true in broad terms, it's misleading to read the political conflicts of 1796 or 1800 back into the debate over the Constitution.

The more democratic-minded among the Constitution's critics were most concerned over the lack of a Bill of Rights, which was quickly corrected by the first Congress. Less democracy-minded opponents wanted a more monarchical government, or were afraid that the Constitutional government might make it more difficult for their own "faction" to make mischief for narrow ends.

By the 1820s, a significant urban working class had developed and were beginning to from their own organizations and to assert themselves as an important political "faction". They were an essential part of the Jacksonian democratic coalition. In The Age of Jackson (1945), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., quotes an issue of the Working-Men's Gazette from Vermont from this period which articulated grievances that most workers' papers at the time also highlighted:

Equal Universal Education.
Abolition of Imprisonment for Debt.
Abolition of all Licensed Monopolies.
An entire Revision, or Abolition of the present Militia System.
A Less Expensive Law System.
Equal Taxation on Property.
An Effective Lien Law for Laborers.
All Officers to be Elected by the People.
No Legislation on Religion.

Given the current power of the Christian Right in the Republican Party, it's notable that separation of church and state were a major concern of the early workingclass organizations in the US. At this period, the federal Constitution forbid the "establishment" of religion, but the federal Bill of Rights did not apply to the states until the post-Civil War 14th Amendment was adopted.

Schlesinger gives and example of how one grievance played out:

But the main specific grievance came to be the question of imprisonment for debt. In 1830 five sixths of the persons in the jails of New England and the Middle states were debtors, most of them owing less than twenty dollars. The law was thus, in effect, a class law, applying chiefly to the poor. It was an irrational law, for, by withdrawing debtors from the economic world, it prevented their saving up and paying off. It was, moreover, insulting, for in last analyg assumed that debtors would never meet their obligations unless prompted by terror of punishment. General fears about loss of status thus began to focus on imprisonment for debt as a peculiarly cruel and wanton agency of degradation.

John Quincy Adams, after his Presidency, distinguished himself in his advocacy for the abolition of slavery. But as President, he was scarcely a partisan of the dispossed. Schlesinger writes that President Adams opposed efforts by New York Senator Martin Van Buren and otheres to ban imprisonment for debt:

The chief opposition came from the business community with its vague but deep conviction that imprisonment for debt was bound up with sanctity of contracts. "I shall surely get no thanks from any one," wrote [President] John Quincy Adams testily in 1831, contemplating a letter on this question, "for pointing to the consequences ... upon the security of property and upon fidelity to contracts, as well as upon credit." Van Buren reported meeting the greatest hostility among mer-rliants and lawyers. ... Years later Thurlow Weed discovered certain prominent businessmen in Albany incredulous at the idea they could have fought the reform until he showed them antiabolition petitions headed by their own names.

(The latter reminds me of all the Southern whites who never, ever supporter segregation. Hopefully, ten years from now we'll hear the same kind of hypocritical lying from those who today support the Cheney-Bush torture policy. We're already hearing it from people who never supported the Iraq War, oh, no.)

As President, Andrew Jackson supported the movement against debtor prisons at the federal and state levels. The practice was abolished for federal courts in 1832. It was one of the Jacksonian movements successes that the practice was largely abolished in the states by the 1840s. Jackson said "it should be the care of a republic not to exert a grinding power over misfortune and poverty."

It was one of the great advantages of American democracy, compared even to nations like Prussia and France in Jackson's time, that various classes and "factions" could exert influence on the Constitutional government to shape policy. As Dave mentioned in his earlier post, the state can be and often is an instrument of oppression: debtor's prison is an excellent example.

But a democratic state can and has been employed as well to limit and balance the excessive power that private interests can and do exercise over the less economically powerful. The goal of the Roberts Four in last week's Community Schools re-segregation decision was to prevent the government from stepping in to prevent racial discrimination. Although that particular decision applied to schools, today's Republicans would love to see the Supreme Court invalidate any and all legislation aimed at preventing racial discrimination in private employment.

Which brings me to the utopian idea of the eventual disppearance of the State as we know it. There were utopian groups in the days of Andrew Jackson who formed ideal communities whose goal was to create an isolated ideal society. The Mormon Church essentially attempted such a project in its early years.

In the labor movement, both in Europe and the US, the idea has also been envisioned as a desirable goal. Frederick Engels famously forsaw "the withering away of the state" in the ultimate worldwide condition of communism. Anarchists and syndicalists envisioned a kind of labor self-government, the One Big Union in the famous "Wobbly" formulation (Industrial Workers of the World, IWW). But those visions of the state disappearing were in a way circular definition. They defined the state as a tool of class rule. Once classes were abolished in the ideal world, there could be no "state" by definition.

But all of those concepts envisioned some kind of governing institution for society that would be the equivalent of what most of us would think of as the state: the Church, the One Big Union, the Owenite or Fourierian commune.

Today's economic "libertarians" also envision a withering away of the state of a particular kind. But they don't want to want until property is owned in common and social classes have disappeared. Some of the more radical libertarians might like to do away with basically the entire civilian government except for the military and the police. Heck, these days they may even want private security companies and mercenary firms to take over those roles, too. Many of them would settle for doing away with anti-discrimination laws, workers' saftey laws and agencies, food and drug standards and pollution restrictions.

But rule by One Big Corporation doesn't sound so appealing to most people.

A healthy Jacksonian democracy would be an awful lot better for most of us.

Tags: american revolution, james madison