Beard vs. Roche: Framing the Constitution

1. Beard vs. Roche

2. Framing the ConstitutionCharles A. Beard • Beard suggests that the Constitution was nothing more than the work of an economic elite that was seeking to preserve its property. • This elite, according to Beard, consisted of landholders, creditors, merchants, public bondholders, and wealthy lawyers. Beard demonstrated that many of the delegates to the convention fell into one of these categories.

3. Goal to Limit Popular Majorities • According to Beard’s thesis, as the delegates met, the primary concern of most of them was to limit the power of popular majorities and thus protect their own property interests. • To Beard, the anti-majoritarian attributes that he felt existed in the Constitution were a reflection of the less numerous creditor class attempting to protect itself against incursions by the majority.

4. Constitution Protects Property • Specific provisions as well were put into the Constitution with a view toward protecting property, such as the clause prohibiting states from impairing contracts, coining money, or emitting bills of credit. • Control over money was placed in the hands of the national government, and in Article VI of the Constitution it was provided that the new government was to guarantee all debts that had been incurred by the national government under the Articles of Confederation.

5. Beard v. Roche • Ironically, Beard, like Roche, was attempting to dispel the prevailing notions of his time that the Constitution had been formulated by philosopher kings whose wisdom could not be challenged. • But while Roche postulates a loosely knit practical political elite, Beard suggests the existence of a cohesive and even conspiratorial economic elite. • The limitation on majority rule was an essential component of this economic conspiracy.

6. Evidence Does Not Support Beard • Beard’s thesis was startling at the time it was published in 1913. As it came under close examination, it was revealed that the evidence simply did not support Beard's hypothesis. • Key leaders of the convention, including Madison, were not substantial property owners. Several important opponents to ratification of the Constitution were the very members of the economic elite that Beard said conspired to thrust the Constitution upon an unknowing public.

7. The Founding Fathers:A Reform Caucus in Action • John P. Roche suggests that the framing of the Constitution was essentially a democratic process involving the reconciliation of a variety of state, political, and economic interests

8. Framers Were Politicians • Roche writes: "Perhaps the time has come, to borrow Walton Hamilton's fine phrase, to raise the framers from immortality to mortality, to give them credit for their magnificent demonstration of the art of democratic politics. The point must be reemphasized: they made history and did it within the limits of consensus."

9. Constitutional Convention • Roche writes that "the Philadelphia Convention was not a College of Cardinals or a council of Platonic guardians working in a manipulative, pre-democratic framework; • it was a nationalist reform caucus that had to operate with great delicacy and skill in a political cosmos full of enemies to achieve one definitive goal, popular approbation.”

10. The Framers as a Political Elite • Roche recognizes that the framers, collectively, were an elite, but he is careful to point out that they were a political elite dedicated for the most part to establishing an effective and at the same time controlled national government that would be able to overcome the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation.

11. Framers Were Not a Conspiratorial Economic Elite • The framers were not, says Roche, a cohesive elite dedicated to a particular set of political or economic assumptions beyond the simple need to create a national government that would be capable of reconciling disparate state interests. • Roche contrasts with Beard who viewed the Framers an economic elite out to protect their personal property.

12. Roche on The Constitutionalists • When the Constitutionalists went forth to subvert the Confederation, they utilized the mechanisms of political legitimacy. And the roadblocks which confronted them were formidable. At the same time, they were endowed with certain potent political assets. • The history of the United States from 1786 to 1790 was largely one of a masterful employment of political expertise by the Constitutionalists as against bumbling, erratic behavior by the opponents of reform. Effectively, the Constitutionalists had to induce the states, by democratic techniques of coercion, to emasculate themselves

13. Constitutionalists Persuasion • The great achievement of the Constitutionalists was their ultimate success in convincing the elected representatives of a majority of the white male population that change was imperative. • A small group of political leaders with a Continental vision and essentially a consciousness of the United State, international impotence, provided the matrix of the movement.

14. Constitutionalist's Assets • Their great assets were • the presence in their caucus of the one authentic American "father figure," George Washington, whose prestige was enormous; • the energy and talent of their leadership (in which one must include the towering intellectuals of the time, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, despite their absence abroad), • and their communications "network," which was far superior to anything on the opposition side

15. Conclusion • John Roche's article on the framing of the Constitution was written as an attack upon a variety of views that suggested the Constitution was not so much a practical political document as an expression of elitist views based upon political philosophy and economic interests [Charles Beard].