Progressive Historians by Richard Hofstadter

Author:Richard Hofstadter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307809605
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-07T21:00:00+00:00

1 An Economic Interpretation, 153, 216; see Douglass Adair, “The Tenth Federalist Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly, 8 (1951), 48–67.

2 “Making the Fascist State,” New Republic, 57 (1929), 277; italics added. Beard was somewhat more receptive in 1929 to the evolutionary possibilities of the corporate state than he had been in 1913 to the evolutionary possibilities of the American Constitution. “This is far from the frozen dictatorship of Russian Tsardom,” he wrote of Mussolini’s regime, “It is more like the American check and balance system; and it may work out in a new democratic direction .… Beyond question an amazing experiment is being made here, an experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism, politics and technology.” Ibid., 278. Beard, of course, was not alone among American liberals in giving early fascism a more indulgent hearing than they would later care to remember. For the background, see John P. Diggins, “Flirtation with Fascism: American Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini’s Italy,” American Historical Review, 71 (1966), 487–506.

3 Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention (rev. ed. 1937), I, 48, 133, 362, 365, 423. Sherman, it might be added, contributed to the greatest single tactical error of the advocates of the Constitution when he dismissed the proposal for a bill of rights in the original Constitution on the ground that the powers of the federal government clearly did not supersede the state declarations of rights. Ibid, II, 588.

4 Farrand, Records, II, 52–3, 31, 35–6.

5 Cf. the conclusion of J. R. Pole: “Once the Federal government was in operation, its electoral system gave a possibly unintentional but nevertheless an unmistakable impetus to the idea of political democracy.” Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (1966), 365, and the discussion, 339–65.

6 In 1784 Jefferson had proposed universal manhood suffrage for the territorial assemblies, but this had been rejected in favor of the then rather stiff requirement of a fifty-acre freehold; this requirement was reaffirmed in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

7 Pole, Political Representation, 170; see this work, passim, for a subtle and detailed explication of the changing political role of property.

8 On the meaning of democracy in the Western world, see R. R. Palmer, “Notes on the Use of the Word ‘Democracy,’ 1789–1799,” Political Science Quarterly, 68 (1953), 203–6. Also helpful is Robert W. Shoemaker, “ ‘Democracy’ and ‘Republic’ as Understood in Late Eighteenth-Century America,” American Speech, 41 (1966), 83–95, though I am unable to follow the author’s conclusion that the difference between a democracy and a republic was that between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.

9 Farrand, Records, I, 49, 134, 136; see the discussions ibid., I, 48–50, 132–8, 214–15, 358–62; II, 201–5, 215–16. Attempts to impair the normal popular composition of the lower house, or its efficacy, fared badly. Direct election of the members of the House of Representatives was first passed in the Convention by a vote of six to two, with two states divided. Then, after a move to have them chosen by the state legislatures was defeated eight to three, popular election was reaffirmed by a vote of nine to one, with one divided.

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