'Special-Dave' Having Yet Another Medical Marijuana Pipe Dream
On Jan 26, 8:23*am, dave wrote:
On 01/26/2011 04:24 AM, RHF wrote:
* .
- That's not what Charles A Beard wrote, in 1913 .
- And George Washington wasn't a poor man when
- he was born . Tobacco was extremely popular and
- expensive in the Old World .
- He was not a farmer, that's for sure !
You're right. He was also a surveyor.
As a leader of the "progressive historians," or "progressive
historiography," Beard introduced themes of economic self-interest and
economic conflict regarding the adoption of the Constitution and the
transformations caused by the Civil War. Thus he emphasized the
long-term conflict among industrialists in the Northeast, farmers in the
Midwest, and planters in the South that he saw as the cause of the Civil
War. His study of the financial interests of the drafters of the United
States Constitution (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution)
seemed radical in 1913, since he proposed that the U.S. Constitution was
a product of economically determinist, land-holding founding fathers. He
saw ideology as a product of economic interests.
[edit] Constitution
Historian Carl Becker in History of Political Parties in the Province of
New York, 1760-1776 (1909) formulated the Progressive interpretation of
the American Revolution. He said there were two revolutions: one against
Britain to obtain home rule, and the other to determine who should rule
at home. Beard expanded upon Becker's thesis, in terms of class
conflict, in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the
United States (1913) and An Economic Interpretation of Jeffersonian
Democracy (1915). To Beard, the Constitution was a counter-revolution,
set up by rich bondholders ("personalty" since bonds were "personal
property"), in opposition to the farmers and planters ("realty" since
land was "real property.") Beard argued the Constitution was designed to
reverse the radical democratic tendencies unleashed by the Revolution
among the common people, especially farmers and debtors. In 1800, said
Beard, the farmers and debtors, led by plantation slave owners,
overthrew the capitalists and established Jeffersonian democracy. Other
historians supported the class-conflict interpretation, noting the
states confiscated great semi-feudal landholdings of loyalists and gave
them out in small parcels to ordinary farmers. Conservatives, such as
William Howard Taft, were shocked at the Progressive interpretation
because it seemed to belittle the Constitution.[12] Many scholars,
however, eventually adopted Beard's thesis and by 1950 it had become the
standard interpretation of the era.
Beginning about 1950, however, historians started to argue that the
progressive interpretation was factually incorrect. These historians
were led by Charles A. Barker, Philip Crowl, Richard P. McCormick,
William Pool, Robert Thomas, John Munroe, Robert E. Brown and B. Kathryn
Brown, and above all Forrest McDonald.[13]
Forrest McDonald in We The People: The Economic Origins of the
Constitution (1958) argued that Charles Beard had misinterpreted the
economic interests involved in writing the Constitution. Instead of two
interests, landed and mercantile, which conflicted, there were three
dozen identifiable interests that forced the delegates to bargain.
Evaluating the historiographical debate, Peter Novick concluded:
* * *“By the early 1960s it was generally accepted within the historical
profession that ...Beard’s Progressive version of the ...framing of the
Constitution had been decisively refuted. American historians came to
see ....the framers of the Constitution, rather than having
self-interested motives, were led by concern for political unity,
national economic development, and diplomatic security.”[14]
Beard's economic determinism was largely replaced by the intellectual
history approach, which stressed the power of ideas, especially
republicanism, in stimulating the Revolution.[15] However, the legacy of
examining the economic interests of American historical actors endures.
-wikipedia
And does endure, indeed .
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