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6. American Property Interests
Happy Preface
Happy Birthday to me and to Simone de Beauvoir, Richard Nixon, and Elvis Presley! I am feeling feisty today, and to celebrate I shall find fault with our Founding Fathers. Of course I am thankful that the Founding Fathers provided me with the United States of America to live in, but I am also thankful for the progress made over their dead bodies. I dutifully appreciate the principle of fatherhood, but I am no Confucian: not only do I have, as my father frequently found in me, a problem with authority, I am duty bound to revolt against it in the name of modern progress. Mind you that without progress no goods may be obtained from those evils euphemistically called lesser goods; therefore, please do not think I am up to no good when I make such statements as:
"We have been framed by the Framers of the United States Constitution who took it upon themselves to repudiate the natural principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that there are certain unalienable rights, evident to each self born equal, to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, and the right, after giving due notice, to abolish by force any government that would destroy those ends we find in ourselves."
American Property Interests
Citizens of the United States used to revere the wisdom of patriarchs if not their divine right to govern one nation under God. But nothing is sacred any more, and, lest progress become regress, it had better not be. In the beginning not all people equally born in the United States of America had a birthright to citizenship, and those who were citizens had unequal rights. The political liberty extolled by the Revolutionaries was limited to the most privileged citizens; they turned out to be conservatives instead of liberals after they took office. Thus the Revolution was really a changing of the guard with some structural reforms such as temporary, elected kings - presidents who can pardon any crime and who can, with the cooperation of 34 members of their senate council, run roughshod over 280 million citizens if not the entire world. The Founding Fathers may have loved their families and friends, but their greed was untempered by love for the equal rights or freedoms of humankind regardless of gender, race, creed, and country of origin. In fact, the most fundamental right of all was violated by the Framers - the right to one's own body - when slavery was embodied in the Constitution. the forefathers were concerned not with civil rights or natural law but with political expediency. The "Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" of the Constitution's Preamble were intended for the privileged few.
People who believe in economic determinism instead of divine providence know very well what the Framers loved the most: property. Yes, indeed, the primary concern of the majority of the Framers was obviously their property. It goes without saying that, by pursuit of happiness, they meant the pursuit of property. Of course the French had the gall to actually name property as the real object of revolution, but the term was lined out in the American declaration and happiness was substituted for it - since the two are synonymous in many minds, it made no sustantial difference. The fundamental property was to be a male domain, a fertile soil where white men could sow their seeds and raise up their tribute to their chosen race and its only god. Only those white men who had property were to vote and to therefore participate in governing the newly declared freedom. People unqualified by property were excluded from voting on the grounds that only those who are able to get property are competent to vote and to take a serious interest in government.
Of course woman was not to have the vote. How can property vote? By virtue of ancient religious and political principle, woman was a chattel, a virtual slave or movable property who must dutifully obey her husband and follow him wherever he might go. Of course many women took exception to the rule and got away with it as usual, sometimes leading their men around by their noses, but they did not obtain the suffrage essential to the right of self-government until 1920.
An American Progressive
Property is not everything but it is a good start. And its fair distribution is necessary for the general welfare. Charles A. Beard (1874-1948) itemized the property holdings of the delegates to the Constitution Convention of 1787 in his ground-breaking An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), Five-sixths of the delegates stood to personally gain from the adoption of the Constitution, which would protect the public debt and raise the value of their securities. Hence the Constitution was not inspired by age-old wisdom, but by the greed of the public creditors who stood to gain from their version. The losers were the debtors and those who were obviously not represented: the poor, the slaves, the women. By this work alone, which immediately made him famous and controversial, we can see that Beard is someone all Americans should know if they are truly interested in the progressive pursuit of property as a basis for happiness - he eventually abandoned his certainty in the absolute validity of economic determinism and embraced relativism and historicism, but he did not forsake the advocacy of progressive reforms.
Charles Beard shaped a generation of intellectuals. He was one of most popular historians of his time - a time of social injustice, great depression, and war. He was opposed to America's involvement in the world wars because he believed the scientific-industrial revolution should be employed rationally effect full social reform for America instead of wasted on irrational world destruction brought about by economic inequities. Beard was an activist historian: history teaches us lessons that should be used to make progress. Furthermore, he was a utilitarian of sorts who believed that progress should not be measured by the amount of empty talk about it but by hard facts.
After graduating from High School, Charles Beard worked as a journalist for his father's newspaper, but he soon set aside his journalistic aspirations to study for the Methodist ministry at DePauw University. He fell in love there with the woman he would marry, Mary Ritter, an excellent historian in her own right, with whom he would co-author several major works, including the enormously popular work that made them financially independent and famous, The Rise of American Civilization, which turned out to be a summary of the American Progressive school of history with its emphasis on the rational pursuit of ever greater justice and happiness. Mary Ritter Beard wrote works on suffrage and labor issues, and she pioneered women's history with her Woman as Force in History (1946), an effort to demonstrate the power of women in all ages and walks of life.
Although still confident in the advantages to be obtained by industrial progress, the rebellious youth in those trying days veered to the Left when confronted by the industrial revolution's depressing wake that was flooding the world with misery just as the socializing science of mass consumption and broad ownership of property was being brought to bear on the tragic social predicament. At that juncture young Charles came under the influence of the sociological historians at De Pauw. He was also moved by the anti-imperialist rhetoric of William Jennings Bryan. Then he looked evil poverty directly in the face one hot summer in Chicago. Before long he was urging radical reforms, such as union organization and progressive income tax. Charles went on to Oxford. He read Marx and Ruskin. He wrote his first book, The Industrial Revolution (1901), wherein he explained the social problems of the British working class; in accordance with an inherent progressive tendency of history, he maintained that the industrial revolution would bring about beneficial changes in Western culture. While there he founded Ruskin College, a workingman's school where the principles of union and co-operative leadership were taught.
As is evident from his interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, Beard became a staunch proponent of the economic-determinism theory of history for awhile. He resorted to a simplistic, explanatory dualism in his histories of the United States, describing a tug-of-war between capitalists and agrarians. He viewed the Constitution as an instrument capitalist creditors used against landholding debtors. He explained the Jeffersonian Democracy struggle of the 1790's as a partial transfer of federal power from capitalists back to agriculturalists. He inteprets Jacksonian Democracy as a farmer-laborer uprising against the capitalists, and the Civil War as a struggle not over the moral issue of slavery but as the result of the effort of Northern business to drive the Southern-planter aristocracy from power.
Beard was closely associated with another influential historian, James Harvey Robinson, leader of the New History movement that caused college history textbooks to be revamped in order to present history as cultural or social history instead of the usual 'history as past politics.' Thanks to Robinson, history gained respect in America as a social science. New History is based on an understatement that is, due to short attention spans, still a novel concept: we can learn from the past and can therefore put history to good present to obtain a desirable future: happiness. This astounding concept was also elaborated at the time by one of the most remarkable historians of our age, Benedeto Croce (1866-1952).
Precautionary words are in order here for those of us who are amateur historians or social critics. No doubt a New History buff may fall prone to interpreting history according to what she wants in the future, leaving actual history and its hidden lessons in the lurch. There are various philosophies of history and theories of interpretation, some more scientific than others - many thinkers deny that history is a science in any shape or form. 'Theory of interpretation' is the precautionary phrase: when historiography is unashamedly associated with ideological biases, the historian loses his supposed impartial objectivity and becomes a political activist. Nonetheless, argues the activist historian, since historians are necessarily subjective according to their various dispositions and their different perspectives on the same facts, why not unite the various perspectives into a radical agenda for reform? Ironically, the radical process might seem to its advocates to be in perfect accord with legitimate scientific methodology, especially when couched in technical jargon and justified by a rationalistic theology only excelled by the medieval Scholastics; nevertheless, the ideologies are really unfounded; or one might say they are 'founded' on absolute presuppositions that cannot be proven true or false.
Charles Beard returned to the States from Oxford and taught at Columbia. His radical sentiment was tempered there by the prevailing empirical aspiration to a scientific methodology that would lead man to understand man without resort to subjective value judgments. By virtue of positive social science, the sociologist would presumably preside over the realm of practical knowledge superseding the speculative dogma of vain metaphysicians. The positive dream would be realized, with sociology at the apex. The new history would synthesize the sciences and study the techniques of Progress, invoking reform of the status quo ala Helvetius, Bentham, Comte, Beard, Robinson & Co. That is the ideal, but the reality is another matter.The so-called objective value judgment might not suit the subjective moral evaluations of certain suspicious individuals and groups who are wont to conspire against the alchemical synthesis of equality and liberty into democratic imperialism.
Charles Beard became seriously concerned with the totalitarian movements in the world. In 1917, he resigned from Columbia to protest wartime infringements on academic freedom. In 1919, he became a co-founder to the New School for Social Research. He soon retreated to the Connecticut hills. Dismayed by modern warfare's threat to humane values, he set aside his scientific bias in favor of a more humanistic approach. He did not entirely abandon the economic determinism theory; he ocassionally used it to unabashedly support American cultural achievements and the faith in progress that made those achievements possible.
We hear little of Charles Beard today. He fell from grace when he charged the Roosevelt administration with deliberately provoking Japan into war. Again, his distaste for war stemmed from his belief that it distracted Americans from the true mission of their country, that it substituted external war for needed reform within. Some critics believe his opinion on the cause of the war with Japan was simply a mistaken but honest interpretation of the limited facts then available to the public. However that may be, it is worthwhile noting that the United States has considerable Amiercan property interests, once coveted by Japan, in the Pacific Basin, and that its interests in Asia are secured by its presence in Japan and elsewhere in the region as a result of the war.
Happy Conclusion
American property interests certainly have changed a great deal since Colonial and Revolutionary days. The struggle for civil rights continues. Charles and Mary Beard may have been right in thinking that human history has an inherent tendency to progress, and that the scientific-industrial revolution speeds up the process. If we are to progress to a more widespread freedom and distribution of property, we must help progress to progress, just as communists helped economic determinism with its determinations. Now I am beginning to laugh at the social theories which are really hypotheses; after all, it is my birthday, and I am happy to be behind the big guns in America - I just hope the triggers are not pulled. I get a kick out of the idea of rebellion, but I appreciate the problem of authority. I do not believe my American forefathers were wholly evil, nor that they were all greedy, right-wing conservatives just trying to grab Native American land from the British, all for themselves and their heirs, and to subject the rest of the population to their American property interests. Indeed, some folks thought they were too liberal. Take Thomas Jefferson, for instance, who sympathised with Thomas Paine's view that the Earth is a common treasury. As we know very well, Paine is the father of our Social Security system: he proposed charging rent on land to fund the system; in effect, it would be a sort of rent tax. Much more can be said for the liberality of the forefathers, but this is not the place for it: this is the place to petition for more. If the progress of history is any guide, much more will be had. The meaning of the Declaration of Independence has evolved since the catchword was changed from 'property' to 'happiness.' The term 'property' would have sufficed: nobody can be happy without ground to be happy on. Besides 'happiness' is an understatement that could have been left out of the document, just as the French left it out, as a right of man: happiness is, after all, something already understood as the goal of any good government. Yet the inclusion of the term 'happiness' was fortuitous, since happiness can mean a more felicitous distribution and enjoyment of property than was intended by the founding fathers. May everyone in the world have more Happiness.
