Andrew Jackson and the plague of hack history

I'm sorry. But despite the liberal facade, this is conservative, hack history. And in this case the headline is consistent with the text of the article, Anti-Slavery Hamilton May Get To Stay On $10 Bill While Genocidal Slaver Jackson Gets Pushed Off The $20 Huffington Post 04/17/2016.

In the article, Ryan Grim, Laura Barron-Lopez and Zach Carter write:

... now that nobody uses cash, a woman will finally get a spot on a dollar bill.

The tragedy, though, is which bill. Instead of pushing aside pro-slavery, genocidal President Andrew Jackson, the Treasury Department has decided to sideline the first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, to make way for a yet-to-be named woman.

Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers, was a strong opponent of slavery, and was an early member of the New York Manumission Society, an abolitionist group that organized boycotts against merchants connected to the slave trade and lobbied for legislation abolishing the institution.

The article is a reprint of a 06/18/2015 piece. They reprinted it because the Treasury now says they are again considering replacing Jackson on the $20 bill.

I explained my own position on this in Andrew Jackson as a 21st-century political symbol 07/25/2015.

The Huffington Post's polemical contrast of the good Alexander Hamilton, the monarchist that believed republican government could only function through massive corruption on behalf of the wealthy, and Andrew Jackson, is hack propaganda, not any serious left view of history.

I say "left" rather than "progressive" here because part of the problem is that Progressive historian Charles Beard is responsible for a lot of this nonsense. Beard identified with the Progressive movement. And through much of his career, his views on more contemporary issues was in line with the pro-regulation attitude of the Progressives. The Frankfurt School's journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung published an short article by Beard, "The Social Sciences in the United States" in its 4:1 (1935) number.

But he also articulated a cynical, misleading and basically reactionary theory of early American history in which the Constitution was basically an anti-democratic document that represented overwhelmingly the interest of the wealthy only.

It was an interpretation that did not stand up to scrutiny. Nor did the accompanying idea that the pro-Constitution side can be identified easily with the later Federalist Party of John Adams and the anti-Constitution side with that of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party, known in Jefferson's time as the Republican Party but under Jackson's leadership became known as the Democratic Party. It was a simplistic, distorted view whose long survival even in some forms today reflects in large part the interest of the economic Establishment in discrediting the traditional of radical democracy which was, yes, carried in major part by leaders like the slaveowners Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.

Yes, that seems contradictory. And it seems that way because real history is contradictory. If even that much of a hint of Hegelian view of history is too much to swallow, well, welcome to David Barton territory. Even if the hackery is articulated under a liberal rather than a conservative framework.

But, as flawed as Beard's work was in major ways even before he wound up as the chief prophet of rightwing Pearl Harbor revisionism after the Second World War, he had a more informed and sophisticated approach to American history than a David Barton could even fathom. This passage from America in Midpassage (1939) by Charles and Mary Beard shows both the strengths and weaknesses of their approach to the early years of Constitution democracy in the United States (pp. 922-3):

For at no time, at no place, in solemn convention assembled, through no chosen agen ts, had the American people officially proclaimed the United States to be a democracy. The Constitution did not contain the word or any ward lending countenance to it, except possibly the mention of "we, the people," in the preamble. Nor, indeed, did the Constitution even proclaim a republic. It did guarantee a republican form of government in the states, but as John Adams wrote to Mercy Warren, during their heated controversy over political aims, nobody knew just what that meant. As a matter of fact, when the Constitution was framed no respectable person called himself or herself a democrat. The very word then had low connotations, though it was sometimes mentioned with detachment; and the connotations became distinctly horrible to Respectability after the outbreak of the reign of terror in France. Though denounced as a Jacobin by Federalists, Jefferson did not call his party "democratic," and was chary about mentioning the term even in private correspondence. As was said lang afterward, the founders of the republic in general, whether Federalist or Republican, feared democracy more than they feared original sin. Not until Andrew Jackson had retired from the presidency did his followers completely discard the old name "Republican" and officially call themselves "Democrats." After that date references to democracy usually meant "the Democracy," that is, Jackson's party which, strange to relate, soon passed largely under the control of slave owners.

The Whigs and their successors, the Republicans, whatever their popular inclinations, could hardly style themselves democrats, or the United States a democracy, after Jackson's partisans seized the title and identified democracy with their peculiar organization. Moreover one strong wing of the Whig-Republican combination was just as much opposed to everything that savored of democracy as any slaveholder or as any good Federalist of the Hamilton school had been in the latter days of the eighteenth century. If a "sound Republican" had been asked to characterize the United States between 1865 and the end of the century, he would doubtless have called it "a representative republic." Democracy he would have identified with direct government, the initiative, the referendum, popular election of Senators, majority rule, and disrespect for the Supreme Court. As the battle over "more democracy" intensified in the early years of the twentieth century, conservative Republicans grew still more suspicious of democracy. If they mentioned it with any favor, they were quick to make a distinction between "the true democracy" which they espoused and "the false democracy" which "demagogues" were trying to promote. [my emphasis in bold]

Even there we see some rhetorical hairsplitting that is always a sign that caution is in order. For instance, "Jefferson did not call his party "democratic,'" is true only in the sense that the Democratic-Republican Party he led was referred to in common practice as the Republican Party.

Here is the account from the ever-respectable Encyclopædia Britannica on the Democratic Party (online version as of today, text only; internal links not included:

The Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the United States and among the oldest political parties in the world. It traces its roots to 1792, when followers of Thomas Jefferson adopted the name Republican to emphasize their antimonarchical views. The Republican Party, also known as the Jeffersonian Republicans, advocated a decentralized government with limited powers. Another faction to emerge in the early years of the republic, the Federalist Party, led by Alexander Hamilton, favoured a strong central government. Jefferson’s faction developed from the group of Anti-Federalists who had agitated in favour of the addition of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States. The Federalists called Jefferson’s faction the Democratic-Republican Party in an attempt to identify it with the disorder spawned by the “radical democrats” of the French Revolution of 1789. After the Federalist John Adams was elected president in 1796, the Republican Party served as the country’s first opposition party, and in 1798 the Republicans adopted the derisive Democratic-Republican label as their official name.

In 1800 Adams was defeated by Jefferson, whose victory ushered in a period of prolonged Democratic-Republican dominance. Jefferson won reelection easily in 1804, and Democratic-Republicans James Madison (1808 and 1812) and James Monroe (1816 and 1820) were also subsequently elected. By 1820 the Federalist Party had faded from national politics, leaving the Democratic-Republicans as the country’s sole major party and allowing Monroe to run unopposed in that year’s presidential election. [my emphasis]

It makes the important historical point that Jefferson's party found its antecedents not among the opponents of the Constitution as such but among the fact which considered a Bill of Rights to be a necessary component of the Constitution. The view that actually prevailed when the first Congress approved the addition of the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution.

The bottom line for this post: hack history is bad history.

Comments on Charles Beard

The Progressive historian Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948) is one of the most famous American historians, remembered especially for his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. I'll let Encyclopædia Britannica do the summary ("Beard, Charles A." 2006 DVD) from Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD .[Accessed February 6, 2008]:

He ... 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.

Beard's book focuses attention on economic factors in the making of the Constitution. But the traditional way of remembering his book seems to be a shallow cynicism, i.e., the Founders who wrote the Constitution was just looking to make a buck for themselves.

For most of his career, Beard associated himself with the political left in Britain and the US. But the last book of his career, published the year of his death, was President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941 (1948), which echoed the rightwing isolationist indictment of Roosevelt which was also reflected in his American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932–1940 (1946). I've been puzzled for a long time by Beard's reputation and his seeming political flip from Progressive reformer to rightwing isolationist late in his life.

In some ways, the roots of his seeming ideological change may well have been in his earlier work. The argument of Economic Interpretation, apart from some of the factual challenges other historians brought forward, is heavily reductionist. Yes, the participants in the Constitutional Convention of 1787-8 were mean of means and capitalists of some variety. But that's who the leaders of the new democracy were. The United States economy was a developing capitalist economy with few feudal holdovers. Any Constitution that was well suited to the circumstances of the United States would have benefitted the wealthiest portion of society, even if it had been written by paupers.

The Progressive movement was influenced by a particular interpretation of early American history that looked to the pro-business followers of Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Party as the precursors of the kind of affirmative government that Teddy Roosevelt practiced as President in restraining the trusts. William Appleman Williams contributed an essay on Beard to the compilation American Radicals: Some Problems and Personalities (1957), Harvey Goldberg, ed., which was entitled, "Charles Austin Beard: The Intellectual as Tory-Radical". There was definitely a conservative streak in Beard's thought in the heyday of Progressivism.

Beard followed An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States with The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915), which also proved to be a very influential book at the time. Merrill Peterson discusses Beard's work on Jefferson in The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1960). Key to Beard's view of Jefferson was the notion that Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party (the original name of today's Democratic Party, which was normally called the Republican Party prior to the 1820s) grew out of the anti-Constitution movement of the late 1780s, while Hamilton's Federalist Party grew from the Constitution's supporters. Peterson points out that this inaccurate picture of early American party history was based on heavily reliance on Federalist sources. As Peterson puts it:

In truth, the underlying idea of continuity [anti-Constitutionalists to Republicans, pro-Constitutionalist to Federalists] was a Federalist idea. It was as if Beard had taken one of the myths of Federalism - that the Federalists were the friends of the Constitution and the Jeffersonians its enemies - drained off its grosser content, added some fresh ingredients, and then presented the result as a true history of the original parties. Republican arguments to the contrary by Jefferson, Madison, and John Taylor, Beard laid to the "extraordinary cleverness" with which these partisans "claimed the Constitution for themselves". Beard was committed to the Federalist position by his earlier book [on the Constitution]. If the Constitution was framed in hostility to democracy and for the benefit of capitalist groups, then it naturally followed that the Hamiltonian system conformed to the Constitution.

How James Madison, one of the leading members of the Constitutional convention and one of the three authors (along with Hamilton and John Jay) of the Federalist Papers could have been viewed as a conniving enemy of the Constitutional system is a bit hard to imagine.

Peterson writes that Beard presented Jefferson as having been "a radical and doctrinaire agrarian", and that he had used the term "agrarian" in a "confusing double sense of agricultural and anti-capitalist." Jefferson, of course, was not anti-capitalist, nor were the free farmers of his time. Peterson notes that later in his career Beard was to speak positively of Jefferson's politics. But his argument in Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy was distinctly anti-Jefferson, writing him off as essentially a naively utopian agrarian:

The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy has usually been placed, with nearly all of Beard's work, on the Jeffersonian side of the perennial debate. On what grounds it is difficult to see. ...

As critical as he was of twentieth-century capitalism, Beard nevertheless believed the Federalist regime, which gave the spur to capitalism, had been good for the country. The Jeffersonians had cried privilege and corruption. They were right, of course; but it was, Beard thought, merely a question of whose ox was gored. "It was a clear case of a collision of economic interests: fluid capital versus agrarianism. The representation of one interest was as legitimate as the other." The only standard Beard could apply to the parties was that of capacity for constructive work, which in turn depended upon the ability to organize politics around economic want and need. Unquestionably, in Beard's judgment, Hamilton and the Federalists were superior to Jefferson and the Republicans in this crucial task of statesmanship. A refrain of innuendo ran through the book to the effect that the new government would have suffered irreparable injury had the decision on such momentous issues as Hamilton's "been left to those highly etherealized persons who 'cherished the people' - and nothing more." Hamilton's understanding of the economic basis of politics caused Beard to rank him "with the great statesmen of all time." No such encomium was passed on Jefferson.

Tags: charles beard

Frankfurt School, 1935 (2): Charles Beard on the social sciences in the US

Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948)

The 1/1935 number of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung features a short article by the Progressive historian Charles Beard, who was soon to become a bitter isolationist critic of Franklin Roosevelt and his pro-British, anti-German foreign policy.

But his article doesn't deal with foreign policy, but rather with "The Social Sciences in the United States" (the article was published in English). Beard refers to the controversy over to what extent social sciences can qualify as empirical disciplines of an equal scientific validity to the physical sciences. And he writes:

Whatever may be the merits of the controversy, it is certainly true that every student of the social sciences brings to his choice of areas for research, his
detailed investigations, his selection of data, and his organization of materials some more or less clearly developed assumptions and scheme of valuation. If anything is known about the human animal this is known. As Croce says, if some large, generous, and reasoned philosophy does not control the thinker, then some petty, narrow, class, and provincial philosophy will.

And what schemes of organization and valuation have generally prevailed among American scholars in the social sciences ? In the main the system of British Manchesterism has prevailed, with modifications in detail and with acquiescence in certain stubborn contradictions in American practice. For confirmation of this large generalization, the reader is referred to that excellent contribution to the history of social thought in the United States, Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America [1934; italics added]. The systems of Hegel, Marx, and the German socialists of the chair [academia] have had little or no observable influence on American studies in history, politics, economics, or sociology. Veblen may be cited as an exception that illustrates the rule. Even so-called institutional economists bent on „seeing things as they are" have not escaped the constricting influence of British Manchesterism. Nor have American Catholic writers in this field kept pure and undefiled the scheme of Thomas Aquinas.

Presumably by “the scheme of Thomas Aquinas,” Beard was referring to medieval Catholic social teachings which criticized practices like usury (lending at interest) which were a normal and even vital part of capitalist economies.

Manchester economics refers to the laissez-faire, anti-regulation, free trade policies of the classical economists favored by the classical liberal tradition of the 19th century. In America in Midpassage (1939), Beard and his wife and co-author Mary Beard described the prevailing conservative business wisdom in the years leading up to the Great Depression as follows:

Indeed thought in every age had seemed to flow in a kind of cycle, out of
current proverbs into erudite coverage and back again into common sayings. The process was illustrated in 1931 when Albert H. Wiggin, head of the Chase National Bank, engaged in instructing a Senate Committee at Washington, based his philosophy of finance on the maxim of "let us alone," therewith merely repeating a "truism" of the marketplace that had formerly got into the heavy pages of Adam Smith and David Ricardo and out again into the marts of trade.

In the effulgence of the golden glow, the most general system of American thought, upon which professors and nearly everybody else drew for inspiration, was that of smooth and ready acceptance of the prevailing order, from which Satan and nearly all evil had been effectively banished. Its central conception was that the United States of America was a pretty good place, just as constituted. Its special interests were comfort, convenience, pecuniary advancement, emulatory display, salesmanship, unbroken progress in the straight utilitarian direction, and efficiency, with education as a preparation for the realization and enjoyment of such interests. Its philosophy was on the whole "matter-of-fact" and pragmatic. Our world will go on very much this way forever; and if disturbances should arise, we can "recover" the past again by doing more of the same thing we had been doing. There will be no more devastating jars to the American social order, no more wars, revolutions, cataclysms, and national tragedies. [my emphasis]

The onset of the Depression, although it “spread desolation all around” For some of the plutocrats of the day, it didn't shake their basic dogmas much. Still, "economic and political practitioners began to search feverishly for explanations of the plight into which they had fallen and to wonder how they could get out of it."

Beard was a strange and puzzling character. The historian William Appleman Williams, to whom that description could also be applied, wrote an essay about Beard called “Charles Austin Beard: The Intellectual as Tory-Radical” (in Harvey Goldberg, ed., American Radicals: Some Problems and Personalities (1957). If the general outlook of the Frankfurt School in 1935 were described as radical-social-democratic, Beard perspective shared much of their criticism of existing economic conditions but didn't embrace their broader ideas for an ultimate solution. Thus, the “Tory-Radical” label. Williams wrote of Beard’s understanding during the Depression years:

But the depression brought Beard up short. Here was deep and general crisis. And there is little doubt that his intellectual and personal outlook responded immediately. ...

Beard did not, however, launch any frontal attack on private property. His proposal [in 1931] was no more, in essence, than an intelligent and rather extensive development of the idea of a corporate society, previously advanced in America by such men as Herbert Croly and Herbert Hoover. This concept of a corporate society is based on the proposition that every individual holds membership in two of the three basic units of all industrialized societies. All people are citizens, hence are part of the government. And, in addition, they belong either to capital or labor. Thus the
state, in theory at least, is at once the common ground where both parties adjust their differences, and an independent power capable of enforcing judgments on both groups.

But corporatism is not a radical concept, for it is tied intimately to the principle of private property. And this weakens both its theoretical and its practical value. For unless the power to control investments, so vital to balanced economic growth, is exercised on the basis of a public choice between alternate programs and policies, one half of the economic life of society remains in the hands of a tiny minority.

Thus Beard's radical insights into the malfunctioning of the existing system were never matched by an equally fundamental program for its renovation.

I posted a sketch of Williams' own outlook here in 2009 What kind of reformist vision did William Appleman Williams have? 09/01/2009. I commented on his later neo-Confederate version of the American Civil War in 2007 William A. Williams on the Civil War 07/17/2007.

Tags: charles beard, frankfurt school, william appleman williams