Source: Ollman, Bertell (ed.) - Karl Marx - 2012

The Constitution as an Elitist Document

Michael Parenti

Political scientist Michael Parenti is the author of Power and the Powerless (1978), Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media (1986), Democracy for the Few (5th ed. 1987), The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race (1989), and other works. He is currently completing Make Believe Media, a book on the politics of Hollywood film and television. Parenti resides in Washington, D.C., and lectures widely.

The following selection is reprinted, with emendations by the author for this edition, by permission of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, from “The Constitution as an Elitist Document,” in Robert A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra, eds., How Democratic Is the Constitution? (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1980), 39—58.

How democratic is the Constitution? Not as democratic as we have been taught to believe. I will argue that the intent of the framers of the Constitution was to contain democracy, rather than give it free rein, and dilute the democratic will, rather than mobilize it. In addition, their goal was to construct a centralized power to serve the expanding interests of the manufacturing, commercial, landowning, and financial classes, rather than the needs of the populace. Evidence for this, it will be shown, can be found in the framers’ opinions and actions and in the Constitution they fashioned. Finally, I will argue that the elitist design of the Constitution continues to function as intended, serving as a legitimating cloak and workable system for the propertied interests at the expense of the ordinary populace.

Class and Power in Early America

It is commonly taught that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries men of property preferred a laissez-faire government, one that kept its activities to a minimum. In actuality, they were not against a strong state but against state restrictions on business enterprise. They never desired to remove civil authority from economic affairs but to ensure that it worked for, rather than against, the interests of property. This meant they often had to move toward new and stronger state formations.

Adam Smith, who is above suspicion in his dedication to classical capitalism, argued that, as wealth increased in scope, government would have to perform still greater services on behalf of the propertied class. “The necessity of civil government,” he wrote, “grows up with the acquisition of valuable property.”1 More importantly, Smith argued seventy years before Marx, “Civil authority, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”2

Smith’s views or the purposes of government were shared by the rich and the wellborn who lived in America during the period between the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution. Rather than keeping their distance from government, they set the dominant political tone.

Their power was born of place, position, and fortune. They were located at or near the seats of government and they were in direct contact with legislatures and government officers. They influenced and often dominated the local newspapers which voiced the ideas and interests of commerce and identified them with the good of the whole people, the state, and the nation. The published writings of the leaders of the period are almost without exception those of merchants, of their lawyers, or of politicians sympathetic with them.3

The United States of 1787 has been described as an “egalitarian” society free from the extremes of want and wealth which characterized the Old World, but there were landed estates and colonial mansions that bespoke an impressive munificence. From the earliest English settlements, men of influence had received vast land grants from the crown. By 1700, three-fourths of the acreage in New York belonged to fewer than a dozen persons. In the interior of Virginia, seven persons owned a total of 1,732,000 acres.4 By 1760, fewer than 500 men in five colonial cities controlled most of the commerce, banking, mining, and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard and owned much of the land.5

Here and there could be found farmers, shop owners, and tradesmen who, by the standards of the day, might be judged as comfortably situated. The bulk of the agrarian population were poor freeholders, tenants, squatters, and indentured and hired hands. The cities also had their poor—cobblers, weavers, bakers, blacksmiths, peddlers, laborers, clerks, and domestics, who worked long hours for meager sums.6

As of 1787, property qualifications left perhaps more than a third of the white male population disfranchised.7 Property qualifications for holding office were so steep as to prevent most voters from qualifying as candidates. Thus, a member of the New Jersey legislature had to be worth at least 1,000 pounds, while state senators in South Carolina were required to possess estates worth at least 7,000 pounds, clear of debt.8 In addition, the practice of oral voting, the lack of a secret ballot, and an “absence of a real choice among candidates and programs” led to “widespread apathy.”9 As a result, men of substance monopolized the important offices. “Who do they represent?” Josiah Quincy asked of the South Carolina legislature. “The laborer, the mechanic, the tradesman, the farmer, the husbandman or yeoman? No, the representatives are almost if not wholly rich planters.”10

Dealing with Insurgency

The Constitution was framed by financially successful planters, merchants, lawyers, and creditors, many linked by kinship and marriage and by years of service in Congress, the military, or diplomatic service. They congregated in Philadelphia in 1787 for the professed purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation and strengthening the powers of the central government. They were impelled by a desire to do something about the increasingly insurgent spirit evidenced among poorer people. Fearful of losing control of their state governments, the framers looked to a national government as a means of protecting their interests. Even in a state like South Carolina, where the propertied class was distinguished by the intensity of its desire to avoid any strong federation, the rich and the well-born, once faced with the possibility of rule by the common people” and realizing that a political alliance with conservatives from other states would be a safeguard if the radicals should capture the state government . . . gave up ‘state rights’ for ‘nationalism’ without hesitation.”11 It swiftly became their view that a central government would be less accessible to the populace and would be better able to provide the protections and services that their class so needed.

The landed, manufacturing, and merchant interests needed a central government that would provide a stable currency; impose uniform standards for trade; tax directly; regulate commerce; improve roads, canals, and harbors; provide protection against foreign imports and against the discrimination suffered by American shipping; and provide a national force to subjugate the Indians and secure the value of western lands. They needed a government that would honor at face value the huge sums of public securities they held and would protect them from paper-money schemes and from the large debtor class, the land-hungry agrarians, and the growing numbers of urban poor.

The nationalist conviction that arose so swiftly among men of property during the 1780s was not the product of a strange transcendent inspiration; it was not a “dream of nation-building” that suddenly possessed them as might a collective religious experience. (If so, they were remarkably successful in keeping it a secret in their public and private communications.) Rather, their newly acquired nationalism was a practical and urgent response to material conditions affecting them in a most immediate way. Gorham of Massachusetts, Hamilton of New York, Morris of Pennsylvania, Washington of Virginia, and Pinckney of South Carolina had a greater identity of interest with each other than with debt-burdened neighbors in their home counties. Their like-minded commitment to a central government was born of a common class interest stronger than state boundaries.

The rebellious populace of that day has been portrayed as irresponsible and parochial spendthrifts who never paid their debts and who believed in nothing more than timid state governments and inflated paper money. Little is said by most scholars of the period about the actual plight of the common people, the great bulk of whom lived at a subsistence level. Farm tenants were burdened by heavy rents and hard labor. Small farmers were hurt by the low prices merchants offered for their crops and by the high costs for merchandised goods. They often bought land at inflated prices, only to see its value collapse and to find themselves unable to meet their mortgage obligations. Their labor and their crops usually were theirs in name only. To survive, they frequently had to borrow money at high interest rates. To meet their debts, they mortgaged their future crops and went still deeper into debt. Large numbers were caught in that cycle of rural indebtedness which is the common fate of agrarian peoples in many countries to this day. The artisans, small tradesmen, and workers (or “mechanics,” as they were called) in the towns were not much better off, being “dependent on the wealthy merchants who ruled them economically and socially.”12

During the 1780s, the jails were crowded with debtors. Among the people, there grew the feeling that the revolution against England had been fought for naught. Angry, armed crowds in several states began blocking foreclosures and sales of seized property, and opening up jails. They gathered at county towns to prevent the courts from presiding over debtor cases. In the winter of 1787, farmers in western Massachusetts led by Daniel Shays took up arms. But their rebellion was forcibly put down by the state militia after some ragged skirmishes.13

Containing the Spread of Democracy

The specter of Shays’ Rebellion hovered over the delegates who gathered in Philadelphia three months later, confirming their worst fears about the populace. They were determined that persons of birth and fortune should control the affairs of the nation and check the “leveling impulses” of that propertyless multitude which composed “the majority faction.” “To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction,” wrote James Madison in Federalist No. 10,” and at the same time preserve the spirit and form of popular government is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.” Here Madison touched the heart of the matter: how to keep the spirit and form of popular government with only a minimum of the substance, how to provide the appearance of republicanism without suffering its leveling effects, how to construct a government that would win mass acquiescence but would not tamper with the existing class structure, a government strong enough both to service the growing needs of an entrepreneurial class while withstanding the egalitarian demands of the poor and propertyless.

The framers of the Constitution could agree with Madison when he wrote in the same Federalist No. 10 that “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.” They were of the opinion that democracy was “the worst of all political evils,” as Elbridge Gerry put it. Both he and Madison warned of “the danger of the leveling spirit.” “The people,” said Roger Sherman, “should have as little to do as may be about the Government.” And according to Alexander Hamilton, “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and the well-born, the other the mass of the people. . . . The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.”14

The delegates spent many weeks debating their interests, but these were the differences of merchants, slave owners, and manufacturers, a debate of haves versus haves in which each group sought safeguards within the new Constitution for its particular concerns. Added to this were the inevitable disagreements that arise over the best means of achieving agreed-upon ends. Questions of structure and authority occupied a good deal of the delegates’ time: How much representation should the large and small states have? How might the legislature be organized? How should the executive be selected? What length of tenure should exist for the different officeholders? Yet, questions of enormous significance, relating to the new government’s ability to protect the interests of property, were agreed upon with surprisingly little debate. For on these issues, there were no dirt farmers or poor artisans attending the convention to proffer an opposing viewpoint. The debate between haves and have-nots never occurred.

The portions of the Constitution giving the federal government the power to support commerce and protect property were decided upon after amiable deliberation and with remarkable dispatch considering their importance. Thus all of Article I, Section 8 was adopted within a few days.15 This section gave to Congress the powers needed by the propertied class for the expansion of its commerce, trade, and industry, specifically the authority to (1) regulate commerce among the states and with foreign nations and Indian tribes, (2) lay and collect taxes and impose duties and tariffs on imports but not on commercial exports, (3) establish a national currency and regulate its value, (4) “borrow Money on the credit of the United States”—a measure of special interest to creditors,16 (5) fix the standard of weights and measures necessary for trade, (6) protect the value of securities and currency against counterfeiting, (7) establish “uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States,” and (8) “pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States.”

Some of the delegates were land speculators who expressed a concern about western holdings; accordingly, Congress was given the “Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belong to the United States. …” Some delegates speculated in highly inflated and nearly worthless Confederation securities. Under Article VI, all debts incurred by the Confederation were valid against the new government, a provision that allowed speculators to make generous profits when their securities were honored at face value.17

In the interest of merchants and creditors, the states were prohibited from issuing paper money or imposing duties on imports and exports or interfering with the payment of debts by passing any “Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” The Constitution guaranteed “Full Faith and Credit” in each state “to the Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings” of other states, thus allowing creditors to pursue their debtors more effectively.

The property interests of slave owners were looked after. To give the slave-owning states a greater influence, three-fifths of the slave population were to be counted when calculating the representation deserved by each state in the lower house. The importation of slaves was allowed until 1808. Under Article IV, slaves who escaped from one state to another had to be delivered to the original owner upon claim, a provision unanimously adopted at. the convention.

The framers believed the states acted with insufficient force against popular uprisings, so Congress was given the task of “organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia” and calling it forth, among other reasons, to “suppress Insurrections.” The federal government was empowered to protect the states “against domestic Violence.” Provision was made for “the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards and other needful Buildings” and for the maintenance of an army and navy for both national defense and to establish an armed federal presence within the potentially insurrectionary states—a provision that was to prove a godsend a century later when the army was used repeatedly to break strikes by miners, railroad employees, and factory workers.

In keeping with their desire to contain the majority, the rounders inserted “auxiliary precautions” designed to fragment power without democratizing it. By separating the executive, legislative, and judiciary functions and then providing a system of checks and balances among the various branches, including staggered elections, executive veto, Senate confirmation of appointments and ratification of treaties, and a bicameral legislature, they hoped to dilute the impact of popular sentiments. They also contrived an elaborate and difficult process for amending the Constitution. To the extent that it existed at all, the majoritarian principle was tightly locked into a system of minority vetoes, making sweeping popular actions nearly impossible.

The propertyless majority, as Madison pointed out in Federalist No. 10, must not be allowed to concert in common cause against the established economic order.18 First, it was necessary to prevent unity of public sentiment by enlarging the polity and then compartmentalizing it into geographically insulated political communities. The larger the nation, the greater the “variety of parties and interests” and the more difficult it would be for a majority to find itself and act in unison. As Madison argued, “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other wicked project will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it. . . .”An uprising of impoverished farmers could threaten Massachusetts at one time and Rhode Island at another, but a national government would be large and varied enough to contain each of these and insulate the rest of the nation from the contamination of rebellion.

Political Diversity

Contemporary political scientists have said different things about the concept of political diversity. Some presume that a wide variety of interests produces moderation and compromise, it being argued that the “cross-pressured” lawmaker and voter and the multigroup polity are more likely to avoid the “extremist” solutions that are presumed to inflict those possessed of a single-minded, homogeneous political interest. In contrast, Madison welcomed diversity because it would produce not compromise but division. It would keep the mass of people divided against each other, unable to concert against the opulent class.

Political scientists have also feared that too great a multiplicity of interests makes compromise impossible, leading to the kind of factionalism and instability that supposedly result when a vast array of irreconcilable demands are made on the polity. Here too, Madison was of a different mind. For him, the danger was centripetal, not centrifugal. The problem was not factionalism, as such, but democracy. His concern was that the people might not be riddled with divisions, that they might unify in common cause as an oppressive majority “faction.”

Here I would enter a qualification. A close reading of Federalist No. 10 actually uncovers two themes. The first is the one just mentioned, the one that occupied Madison’s thoughts before and during the convention: the relation between the propertyless and the propertied, the division that was “the most common and durable source of factions,” factions which “ever formed distinct interests in society.” But in the same paragraph of that same great essay, Madison introduced another theme, shifting the focus from the divisions between the propertied and the propertyless to the divisions among the propertied. “A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest grow up of necessity in civilized nations. . . For all his supposed concern for “factions,” Madison was not too worried about these factions. Unlike the factionalism between the propertied and propertyless that necessitated the whole great effort in Philadelphia and the need for a central government, the minority factions of propertied interests caused him no alarm.

True, these minority factions might occasionally be a nuisance; they might “clog the administration” and even “convulse the society.” But for some unstated reason, they would never be able “to sacrifice . . . the public good and the rights of other citizens,” nor could any propertied faction “mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.” Only the majority faction was capable of such evils. Only the propertyless majority was capable of “improper and wicked projects” against property. The propertied interests, whatever their particular differences, would never advocate “an abolition of debts” or “an equal division of property”; they would never jeopardize the institution of property and wealth and the untrammeled uses thereof, which in their eyes—and Madison’s—constituted the essence of “liberty.”

There was, then, no need to impose constitutional checks upon the haves. If a larger polity would make it difficult for the populace to coalesce, it would do just the opposite for the propertied elites, allowing them to organize a centralized force to protect themselves from the turbulent plebeians within the various states. They would do well to settle their particular differences and work in unison to defend their common class interests. Indeed, in large part, that was what the Philadelphia convention was all about. Madison wanted what every elite has ever wanted, unity of purpose within his own class and divisions and conflicts within the other, larger one.

By focusing on Madison’s second theme, the diversity of supposedly self-regulating propertied interests, modern-day political scientists discovered pluralism. By ignoring his first and major theme, the conflict between haves and have-nots, they have yet to discover class conflict.

It is interesting to note that Madison did not advocate minority rights as some abstract principle, although some of the language in the Federalist Papers seems to suggest so. He was concerned about protecting the propertied minority and not regional, racial, ethnic, or state minorities. In fact, on the question of representation he took a hardline majoritarian position. As a Virginian he repeatedly argued against giving the small states an equal voice in the Senate with the large ones. Representation should be proportional to population with no special provisions for the less populous states. On this question he evidenced not the slightest fear of majoritarian dominance, no difficulty in brushing aside the anxieties of representational minorities in smaller states. To repeat, Madison’s fear in Philadelphia was not of some abstract majority but of a particular class majority, a democracy.19

Besides preventing the people from finding horizontal cohesion, the Constitution was designed to dilute their vertical force, blunting its upward thrust upon government by interjecting indirect and staggered forms of representation. Thus, the senators from each state were to be elected by their respective state legislatures and were to have rotated terms of six years. The chief executive was to be selected by an electoral college voted by the people but, as anticipated by the framers, composed of men of substance and prominence who would gather in their various states and choose a president of their own liking. The Supreme Court was to be elected by no one, its justices being appointed to life tenure by the president and confirmed by the Senate.20

This system of checks would be the best safeguard against “agrarian attempts” and “symptoms of a leveling spirit,” observed Madison at the convention. In those same remarks, he opposed a six-year term for the Senate, preferring a nine-year one because he believed the Senate should be composed of “a portion of enlightened citizens whose limited number and firmness might seasonably interpose against” popular impetuosity.21 Exactly who were the “enlightened citizens”? Certainly not the tenants and squatters, nor even the average freeholder. Only the men of substance. If wealth were not a sufficient cause of enlightenment, it was almost always a necessary condition for Madison and his colleagues. Who else would have the breeding, education, and experience to govern? While often treated as an abstract virtue, “enlightened” rule had a real class meaning.

The only portion of government directly elected by the people was the House of Representatives. Many of the delegates would have preferred excluding the public entirely from direct representation. John Mercer observed that he found nothing in the proposed Constitution more objectionable than “the mode of election by the people. The people cannot know and judge of the characters of Candidates. The worst possible choice will be made.” Others were concerned that demagogues would ride into office on a populist tide only to pillage the treasury and wreak havoc on all. “The time is not distant,” warned Gouverneur Morris, “when this Country will abound with mechanics and manufacturers [industrial workers] who will receive their bread from their employers. Will such men be the secure and faithful Guardians of liberty? . . . Children do not vote. Why? Because they want prudence, because they have no will of their own. The ignorant and dependent can be as little trusted with the public interest.”22

Several considerations softened the framers’ determination to contain democracy. First and most important, the delegates recognized that there were limits to what the states would ratify. They also understood that if the federal government were to have any kind of stability, it must gain some measure of popular acceptance. Hence, for all their class biases, they were inclined to “leave something for the People,” even if it were only “the spirit and form of popular government,” to recall Madison’s words. In addition, some delegates feared not only the tyranny of the many but the machinations of the few. It was Madison who reminded his colleagues that in protecting themselves from the multitude, they must not reintroduce a “cabal” or a monarchy, thus erring in the opposite direction.

Plotters or Patriots?

The question of whether the founders were motivated by financial or national interest has been debated since Charles Beard published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution in 1913. It was Beard’s view that the delegates were guided by their class interests. Arguing against Beard’s thesis are those who believe that the framers were concerned with higher things than lining their purses and protecting their property. True, they were moneyed men who profited directly from policies initiated under the new Constitution, but they were motivated by a concern for nation building that went beyond their particular class interests, the argument goes.23 To paraphrase Justice Holmes, these men invested their belief to make a nation; they did not make a nation because they had invested. “High-mindedness in not impossible to man,” Holmes reminded us.

That is exactly the point: High-mindedness is one of man’s most common attributes even when, or especially when, he is pursuing his personal and class interest. The fallacy is to presume that there is a dichotomy between the desire to build a strong nation and the desire to protect property and that the delegates could not have been motivated by both. In fact, like most other people, they believed that what was good for themselves was ultimately good for the entire society. Their universal values and their class interests went hand in hand; to discover the existence of the “higher” sentiment does not eliminate the self-interested one.

Most persons believe in their own virtue. The founders never doubted the nobility of their effort and its importance for the generations to come. Just as many of them could feel dedicated to the principle of “liberty for all” and at the same time own slaves, so could they serve both their nation and their estates. The point is not that they were devoid of the grander sentiments of nation building but that there was nothing in the concept of nation which worked against their class interest and a great deal that worked for it.

People tend to perceive things in accordance with the position they occupy in the social structure; that position is largely—although not exclusively— determined by their class status. Even if we deny that the framers were motivated by the desire for personal gain that moves others, we cannot dismiss the existence of their class interest. They may not have been solely concerned with getting their own hands in the till, although enough of them did, but they were admittedly preoccupied with defending the propertied few from the propertyless many—for the ultimate benefit of all, as they understood it. “The Constitution,” as Staughton Lynd noted, “was the settlement of a revolution. What was at stake for Hamilton, Livingston, and their opponents, was more than speculative windfalls in securities; it was the question, what kind of society would emerge from the revolution when the dust had settled, and on which class the political center of gravity would come to rest.”24

The small farmers, tradesmen, and debtors who opposed a central government have been described as motivated by self-serving parochial interests— as opposed to the supposedly higher-minded statesmen who journeyed to Philadelphia and others of their class who supported ratification. How or why the propertied rich became visionary nation builders is never explained. In truth, it was not their minds that were so much broader but their economic interests. Their motives were neither higher nor lower than those of any other social group struggling for place and power in the United States of 1787-1789. They pursued their material interests as single-mindedly as any small freeholder—if not more so. Possessing more time, money, information, and organization, they enjoyed superior results. How could they have acted otherwise? For them to have ignored the conditions of governance necessary for the maintenance of their enterprises would have amounted to committing class suicide—and they were not about to do that. They were a rising bourgeoisie rallying around a central power in order to advance their class interests. Some of us are quite willing to accept the existence of such a material-based nationalism in the history of other countries, but not in our own.

Among the mass of ordinary people there were some who supported the new Constitution. For instance some northern workers in cities like New York supported the provisions for stronger manufacturing and shipping protections.25 This point has been made by latter-day apologists who wish to emphasize that the framers’ work had popular support. Apparently suggestions that some workers supported the Constitution from direct economic interest is an acceptable datum, but to suggest that merchants, manufacturers, landowners, speculators, and creditors did so is a contention bred of the crudest economic determinism.

Finally, those who argue that the founders were motivated primarily by high-minded objectives consistently overlook the fact that the delegates repeatedly stated their intention to erect a government strong enough to protect the haves from the have-nots. They gave voice to the crassest class prejudices and never found it necessary to disguise the fact—as have latter-day apologists—that their uppermost concern was to diminish popular control and resist all tendencies toward class equalization (or “leveling,” as it was called). Their opposition to democracy and their dedication to the propertied and moneyed interests were unabashedly and openly avowed. Their preoccupation was so pronounced that one delegate, James Wilson, did finally complain of hearing too much about how the purpose of government was to protect property. He wanted it noted that the ultimate objective of government was the ennoblement of mankind—a fine sentiment that evoked no opposition from his colleagues as they continued about their business.

An Elitist Document

More important than conjecturing about the framers’ motives is to look at the Constitution they fashioned, for it tells a good deal about their objectives. It was, and still is, largely an elitist document, more concerned with securing property interests than personal liberties. Bills of attainder and ex post facto laws are expressly prohibited, and Article I, Section 9, assures us that “the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it,” a restriction that leaves authorities with a wide measure of discretion. Other than these few provisions, the Constitution that emerged from the Philadelphia Convention gave no attention to civil liberties.

When Colonel Mason suggested to the Convention that a committee be formed to draft “a Bill of Rights”—a task that could be accomplished “in a few hours”—the representatives of the various states offered little discussion on the motion and voted almost unanimously against it. The Bill of Rights, of course, was ratified only after the first Congress and president had been elected.

For the founders, liberty meant something different from democracy; it meant liberty to invest and trade and carry out the matters of business and enjoy the security of property without encroachment by king or populace. The civil liberties designed to give all individuals the right to engage actively in public affairs were of no central concern to the delegates and, as noted, were summarily voted down.

When asking how democratic the Constitution is, we need look not only at the Constitution but also at what we mean by “democracy,” for different definitions have been ascribed to the term. Let us say that democracy is a system of governance that represents, both in form and content, the desires and interests of the ruled. This definition is more meaningful for the twentieth century—and at the same time somewhat closer to the eighteenth century one—than the currently propagated view that reduces democracy to a set of procedures and “rules of the game.” Democracy is a social order with a social class content—which is why the framers so disliked it. What they feared about democracy was not its forms but its content, the idea that the decisions of government might be of substantive benefit to the popular class at the expense of their own.

In a democracy, the people exercise a measure of control by electing their representatives and by subjecting them to the check of periodic elections, open criticism, and removal from office. In addition, a democratic people should be able to live without fear of want, enjoying freedom from economic, as well as political, oppression. In a real democracy, the material conditions of people’s lives should be humane and roughly equal. It was this democratic vision that loomed as a nightmare for the framers and for so many of their spiritual descendants today.

Some people argue that democracy is simply a system of rules for playing the game, which allows some measure of mass participation and government accountability, and that the Constitution is a kind of rule book. One should not try to impose, as a precondition of democracy, particular class relations, economic philosophies, or other substantive arrangements on this open-ended game. This argument certainly does reduce democracy to a game. It presumes that formal rules can exist in a meaningful way independently of substantive realities. Whether procedural rights are violated or enjoyed, whether one is treated by law as pariah or prince, depends largely on material realities that extend beyond a written constitution or other formal guarantees of law. Whether a political system is democratic depends not only on its procedures but on its substantive outputs, that is, the actual material benefits and costs of policy and the kind of social justice, or injustice, that is propagated. By this view, a government that pursues policies that by design or neglect are so inequitable as to deny people the very conditions of life, is not fully democratic, no matter how many competitive elections it holds.

The twentieth-century concept of social justice, involving something more than procedural liberties, is afforded no place in the eighteenth-century Constitution. The Constitution says nothing about those conditions of like that have come to be treated by many people as essential human rights—for instance, freedom from hunger; the right to decent housing, medical care, and education regardless of ability to pay; the right to gainful employment, safe working conditions, and a clean, nontoxic environment. Under the Constitution, equality is treated as a procedural right without a substantive content. Thus, “equality of opportunity” means equality of opportunity to move ahead competitively and become unequal to others; it means a chance to get in the game and best others rather than to enjoy an equal distribution and use of the resources needed for the maintenance of community life.

If the founders sought to “check power with power,” tney seemed chiefly concerned with restraining mass power, while assuring the perpetuation of their own class power. They supposedly had a “realistic” opinion of the self-interested and rapacious nature of human beings—readily evidenced when they talked about the common people—yet they held a remarkably sanguine view of the self-interested impulses of their own class, which they saw as being inhabited by industrious, trustworthy, and virtuous men. Recall Hamilton’s facile reassurance that the rich will “check the unsteadiness” of the poor and will themselves “ever maintain good government” by being given a “distinct permanent share” in it. Power corrupts others but somehow has the opposite effect on the rich and the wellborn.

If the Constitution is so blatantly elitist, how did it manage to win enough popular support for ratification? First, it should be noted that it did not have a wide measure of support, initially being opposed in most of the states. But the same superiority of wealth, leadership, organization, control of the press, and control of political office that allowed the rich to monopolize the Philadelphia Convention worked with similar effect in the ratification campaign, Superior wealth also enabled the Federalists to bribe, intimidate, and, in other ways, pressure and discourage opponents of the Constitution. At the same time, there were some elements in the laboring class, especially those who hoped to profit from employment in shipping and export trades, who supported ratification.26

Above all, it should be pointed out that the Constitution never was submitted to popular ratification. There was no national referendum and none in the states. Ratification was by state convention composed of elected delegates, the majority of whom were drawn from the more affluent strata. The voters who took part in the selection of delegates were subjected to a variety of property restrictions. In addition, the poor, even if enfranchised, carried all the liabilities that have caused them to be underrepresented in elections before and since: a lack of information and organization, illiteracy, a sense of being unable to have any effect on events, and a feeling that none of the candidates represented their interests. There were also the problems of relatively inaccessible polls and the absence of a secret ballot. Even if two-thirds or more of the adult white males could vote for delegates, as might have been the case in most states, probably not more than 20 percent actually did.27

In sum, the framers laid the foundation for a national government, but it was one that fit the specifications of the propertied class. They wanted protection from popular uprisings, from fiscal uncertainty and irregularities in trade and currency, from trade barriers between states, from economic competition by more powerful foreign governments, and from attacks by the poor on property and on creditors. The Constitution was consciously designed as a conservative document, elaborately equipped with a system of minority checks and vetoes, making it hard to enact sweeping popular reforms or profound structural changes, and easy for entrenched interests to endure. It provided ample power to build the services and protections of state needed by a growing capitalist class but not the power for a transition of rule to a different class or to the public as a whole.

Democratic Concessions

For all its undemocratic aspects, the Constitution was not without its historically progressive features.28 Consider the following:

  1. The very existence of a written constitution with specifically limited powers represented an advance over more autocratic forms of government.
  2. No property qualifications were required for any federal officeholder, unlike in England and most of the states. And salaries were provided for all officials, thus rejecting the common practice of treating public office as a voluntary service, which only the rich could afford.
  3. The President and all other officeholders were elected for limited terms. No one could claim a life tenure on any office.
  4. Article VI reads: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States,” a feature that represented a distinct advance over a number of state constitutions which banned Catholics, Jews, and nonbelievers from holding office.
  5. Bills of attainder, the practice of declaring by legislative fiat a specific person or group of people guilty of an offense, without benefit of a trial, were made unconstitutional. Also outlawed were ex post facto laws, the practice of declaring an act a crime and punishing those who had committed it before it had been unlawful.
  6. As noted earlier, the framers showed no interest in a Bill of Rights, but supporters of the new Constitution soon recognized their tactical error and pledged the swift adoption of such a bill as a condition for ratification. So in the first session of Congress, the first ten amendments were swiftly passed and then adopted by the states; these rights included freedom of speech and religion; freedom to assemble peaceably and to petition for redress of grievances; the right to keep arms; freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, self-incrimination, double jeopardy, cruel and unusual punishment, and excessive bail and fines; the right to a fair and impartial trial; and other forms of due process.
  7. The Constitution guarantees a republican form of government and explicitly repudiates monarchy and aristocracy; hence, Article I, Section 9 states: “No title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States …” According to James McHenry, a delegate from Maryland, at least 21 of the 55 delegates favored some form of monarchy. Yet few dared venture in that direction out of fear of popular opposition. Furthermore, delegates like Madison believed that stability for their class order was best assured by a republican form of government. The time had come for the bourgeoisie to rule directly without the baneful intrusions of kings and nobles.

Time and again during the Philadelphia convention, this assemblage of men who feared and loathed democracy found it necessary to show some regard for popular sentiment (as with the direct election of the lower house). If the Constitution was going to be accepted by the states and if the new government was to have any stability, it had to gain some measure of popular acceptance; hence, the founders felt compelled to leave something for the people. While the delegates and their class dominated the events of 1787-89, they were far from omnipotent. The class system they sought to preserve was itself the cause of marked restiveness among the people.

Land seizures by the poor, food riots, and other violent disturbances occurred throughout the eighteenth century in just about every state and erstwhile colony.29 This popular fomentation spurred the framers in their effort to erect a strong central government but it also set a limit on what they could do. The delegates “gave” nothing to popular interests; rather—as with the Bill of Rights—they reluctantly made concessions under the threat of democratic rebellion. They kept what they could and grudgingly relinquished what they felt they had to, driven not by a love of democracy but by a fear of it, not by a love of the people but by a prudent desire to avoid popular uprisings. The Constitution, then, was a product not only of class privilege but of class struggle—a struggle that continued and intensified as the corporate economy and the government grew.

With some democratizing changes, including the direct election of the Senate and the enfranchisement of women, the Constitution fashioned in 1787 has served its intended purpose. During the industrial strife of the late nineteenth century, when the state militias proved unreliable and state legislatures too responsive to the demands of workers, the military power of the federal government was used repeatedly to suppress labor insurgency. Where would the robber barons have been without a Constitution that provided them with the forceful services of the U.S. Aimy?30

Similarly, for over seventy years, the Supreme Court wielded a minority veto on social welfare, unionization, and taxation, preventing reform legislation that had been enacted in European countries decades earlier. The Court became—and with momentary exceptions remains—what the founders intended it to be, a nonelective branch staffed by persons of elitist political, legal, and business backgrounds, exercising a preponderantly conservative influence as guardian of existing class and property relations.

The Senate today qualifies as the “tinsel aristocracy” that Jefferson scorned, composed mostly of persons with large financial holdings, many of them millionaires, who vote their own interests with shameless regularity. The House is subdivided into a network of special-interest subcommittees, dominated by the concerns of banking, agribusiness, and big corporations, in what has become almost a parody of Madison’s lesson on how to divide power in order to fragment mass pressures and protect the propertied few.31

The system of popular elections, an institution most of the founders never liked, has been safely captured by two political parties that are financed by moneyed interests and dedicated to the existing corporate social order. In modern times, especially at the national level, men of property have demonstrated their adeptness at financing elections, running for office, getting elected, and influencing those who are elected, in ways that would warm the heart of the most conservative Federalist. Electoral politics is largely a rich man’s game and the property qualifications—as translated into campaign costs—are far steeper todav than in 1787.

The endeavor the framers began in Philadelphia, for a stronger central government to serve the commercial and industrial class, has continued and accelerated. As industrial capitalism has expanded at home and abroad, the burden of subsidizing its endeavors and providing the military force needed to protect its markets, resources, and client states has fallen disproportionately on that level of government which is national and international in scope— the federal—and on that branch which is best suited to carry out the necessary technical, organizational, and military tasks—the executive. The important decisions increasingly are being made in federal departments and corporate boardrooms and in the advisory committees that are linked to the upper echelons of the executive branch, staffed by public policy makers and private representatives of the major industries. I described this in an earlier work:

One might better think of ours as a dual political system. First, there is the symbolic political system centering around electoral and representative activities including party conflicts, voter turnout, political personalities, public pronouncements, official role-playing and certain ambiguous presentations of some of the public issues which bestir Presidents, governors, mayors and their respective legislatures. Then there is the substantive political system, involving multibillion-dollar contracts, tax write-offs, protections, rebates, grants, loss compensations, subsidies, leases, giveaways and the whole vast process of budgeting, legislating, advising, regulating, protecting and servicing major producer interests, now bending or ignoring the law on behalf of the powerful, now applying it with full punitive vigor against heretics and “troublemakers.” The symbolic system is highly visible, taught in the schools, dissected by academicians, gossiped about by newsmen. The substantive system is seldom heard of or accounted for.32

By offering well-protected havens for powerful special interests, by ignoring substantive rights and outcomes, by mobilizing the wealth and force of the state in a centralizing and property-serving way, by making democratic change difficult, the Constitution has served well an undemocratic military-industrial corporate structure. The rule of the “minority faction,” the “persons of substance,” the “propertied interest,” the “rich and the well-born”—to mention a few of the ways the founders described their class—has prevailed. The delegates would have every reason to be satisfied with the enduring nature of their work.

Notes

1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), p. 309,

2. Ibid., p. 311.

3. Merrill Jensen, The New Nation (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 178.

4. Sidney H. Aronson, Status and Kinship in the Higher Civil Service (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 35.

5. Ibid., p. 41.

6. Ibid., passim.

7. This is Beard’s estimate regarding New York. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 193 5), pp. 67-68. In a few states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, suffrage was more widespread; in others it was even more restricted than New York; see Arthur Ekrich, Jr., The American Democratic Tradition (New York: Macmillan, 1963). For a pioneer work on this subject, see A. E. McKinley, The Suffrage Franchise in the Thirteen English Colonies in America (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1969, originally published 1905). Robert E. Brown makes the argument that Massachusetts was close to being both an economic and political democracy—which would have been alarming news to the Boston aristocracy of manufacturers, merchants, and large property holders. He conjectures that property requirements of a 40 shilling freehold could be easily met and that rural underrepresentation (during the same period that produced Shays’ Rebellion) was due more to indifference than to disenfranchisement. See his Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1955).

8. Beard, An Economic Interpretation, pp. 68, 70.

9. Aronson, Status and Kinship, p. 49.

10. Ibid., p. 49.

11. Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1948), p. 30.

12. Ibid., pp. 9-10. “In addition to being frequently in debt for their lands,” Beard noted, “the small farmers were dependent upon the towns for most of the capital to develop their resources. They were, in other words, a large debtor class, to which must be added, or course, the urban dwellers who were in a like unfortunate condition.” Beard, An Economic Interpretation, p. 28.

13. For a study of this incident, see Monroe Stearns, Shays’ Rebellion, 1786-7: Americans Take Up Arms Against Unjust Laws (New York: Franklin Watts, 1968).

14. The quotations by Gerry, Madison, Sherman, and Hamilton are taken from Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927), vol. 1, passim. For further testimony by the Founding Fathers and other early leaders, see John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), pp. 491 ff. and Andrew C. McLaughlin, A Constitutional History of the United States (New York: Appleton-Century, 1935), pp. 141-144.

15. John Bach McMaster, “Framing the Constitution,” in his The Political Depravity of the Founding Fathers (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964, originally published in 1896), p. 137. Farrand refers to the consensus for a strong national government that emerged after the small states had been given equal representation in the Senate. Much of the work that followed “was purely formal” albeit sometimes time-consuming. See Max Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1913), pp. 134-135.

16. The original working was “borrow money and emit bills.” The latter phrase was deleted after Gouverneur Morris warned that “the Monied interest” would oppose the Constitution if paper notes were not prohibited. There was much strong feeling about this among creditors. In any case, it was assumed that the borrowing power would allow for “safe and proper” public notes should they be necessary. See Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution, p. 147.

17. See Beard, An Economic Interpretation, passim. The profits accrued to holders of public securities were in the millions. On the question of speculation in western lands, Hugh Williamson, a North Carolina delegate, wrote to Madison a year after the convention: “For myself, I conceive that my opinions are not biassed by private Interests, but having claims to a considerable Quantity of Land in the Western Country, I am fully persuaded that the Value of those Lands must be increased by an efficient federal Government.” Ibid., p. 50. Critiques of Beard have been made by Robert E. Brown, Charles Beard and the American Constitution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956) and Forrest McDonald, We the People—The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago; Chicago University Press, 1958).

18. Federalist No. 10 can be found in any of the good editions of The Federalist Papers. It is one of the most significant essays on American politics ever written. With clarity and economy of language, it explains, as do few other short works, how a government may utilize the republican principle to contain the populace and protect the propertied few from the propertyless many. It confronts, if not solves, the essential question of how government may reconcile the tensions between liberty, authority, and dominant class interest. In effect, the Tenth Federalist Paper maps out a method, relevant to this day, for preserving the existing undemocratic class structure under the legitimizing cloak of democratic forms.

19. See his lengthy comments of June 28 and July 14, 1787, in Madison’s The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Which Framed the Constitution of the United States of America, ed. Gaillard Hunt and James Brown Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), pp. 177-180, 256-258.

20. In time, of course, the electoral college proved to be something of a rubber stamp, and the Seventeenth Amendment, adopted in 1913, provided for the popular election of the Senate.

21. Madison’s speech of june 26, 1787, in The Debates in the Federal Convention, p. 167.

22. Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention, vol. 2, pp. 200 ff.

23. For some typical apologistic arguments on behalf of the “Founding Fathers” see Broadus Mitchell and Louise Pearson Mitchell, A Biography of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 46-51, and David G. Smith, The Convention and the Constitution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), chap. 3. Smith argues that the framers had not only economic motives but “larger” political objectives, as if the political had no relation to the economic or as if the economic interests were less selfish because they were national in financial scope.

24. Staughton Lynd, Class Conflict, Slavery and the United States Constitution (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), selection in Irwin Unger, ed., Beyond Liberalism: The New Left Views American History (Waltham, Mass.: Xerox College Publishing, 1971), p. 17. For discussions of the class interests behind the American Revolution, see Alfred F, Young, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976).

25. Beard, An Economic Interpretation, pp. 44-45.

26. See Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961).

27. See the studies cited by Beard, An Economic Interpretation, p. 242 if.

28. This section on the progressive features of the Constitution is drawn from Herbert Aptheker, Early Years of the Republic (New York: International Publishers, 1976), pp. 71 ff. and passim.

29. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), chapter 3.

30. See William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963).

31. For a fuller exposition of these points see my Democracy for the Few, 5th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).

32. Ibid.