[Peace-discuss] democracy or oligarchy?

[ppatton at uiuc.edu]

How Rich is Too Rich For Democracy?
by Thom Hartmann
 
At what point does great wealth held in a few hands actually
harm democracy, threatening to turn a democratic republic into
an oligarchy?

It's a debate we haven't had freely and openly in this nation
for nearly a century, and last week, by voting to end the
Estate Tax, House Republicans tried to ensure that it wouldn't
be had again in this generation.

But it's a debate that's vital to the survival of democracy in
America.

In a letter to Joseph Milligan on April 6, 1816, Thomas
Jefferson explicitly suggested that if individuals became so
rich that their wealth could influence or challenge
government, then their wealth should be decreased upon their
death. He wrote, "If the overgrown wealth of an individual be
deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law
of equal inheritance to all in equal degree..."

In this, he was making the same argument that the Framers of
Pennsylvania tried to make when writing their constitution in
1776. As Kevin Phillips notes in his masterpiece book "Wealth
and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich," a
Sixteenth Article to the Pennsylvania Bill of Rights (that was
only "narrowly defeated") declared: "an enormous proportion of
property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the
rights, and destructive of the common happiness of mankind,
and, therefore, every free state hath a right by its laws to
discourage the possession of such property."

Unfortunately, many Americans believe our nation was founded
exclusively of, by, and for "rich white men," and that the
Constitution had, as its primary purpose, the protection of
the super-rich. They would have us believe that the
Constitution's signers didn't really mean all that flowery
talk about liberal democracy in a republican form of government.

But the signers didn't send other people's kids to war, as
have two generations of the oligarchic Bush family. Many of
the Founders themselves gave up everything, even risking (and
losing) their lives, their life's savings, or losing their own
homes and families to birth this nation.

The myth/theory of the "greedy white Founders" was first
widely advanced by Columbia University professor of history
and self-described socialist Charles Beard, who published in
1913 a book titled "An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution of the United States."

Numerous historians - on both the right and the left - have
since cited his work as evidence that America was founded
solely for the purpose of protecting wealthy interests. His
myth unfortunately helps conservatives support ending the
"death tax" as "the way the Founders would have wanted things"
so that the very richest few can rule America.

Every generation sees the past though the lens of its own
time. Beard, writing as the great financial Robber Baron
empires of Rockefeller, Gould, Mellon, and Carnegie were being
solidified, looked back at the Framers of the Constitution and
imagined he was seeing an earlier, albeit smaller, version of
his own day's history.

But Beard was wrong.

The majority of the signers of the Constitution were actually
acting against their own best economic interests when they put
their signatures on that document, just as had the majority of
the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Beard thought he saw his own era's Robber Barons among the
Colonial economic elite. And, had the Revolution not happened,
he might have been right. But, during and after the
Revolutionary War, the great fortunes loyal to the Crown were
dispersed or fled, and while some of the wealthy British
families of 1776 still hold hereditary seats in the British
House of Lords, nobody can point to a Rockefeller dynasty
equivalent that survived colonial times in the United States.

While there were some in America among the Founders and
Framers who owned a lot of land, Pulitzer Prize winning author
Bernard Bailyn suggests in his brilliant 2003 book "To Begin
the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American
Founders" that they couldn't hold a candle to the true
aristocrats of England. With page after page of photographs
and old paintings of the homes of the Founders and Framers,
Bailyn shows that none of those who created this nation were
rich by European standards.

After an artful and thoughtful comparison of American and
British estates, Bailyn concludes bluntly: "There is no
possible correspondence, no remote connection, between these
provincial dwellings and the magnificent showplaces of the
English nobility..." After showing and describing to his
reader the mansions of the families of power in 18th century
Europe, Bailyn writes: "There is nothing in the American World
to compare with this."

In "Wealth and Democracy," Kevin Phillips notes that: "George
Washington, one of the richest Americans, was no more than a
wealthy squire in British terms." Phillips says that it wasn't
until the 1790' s - a generation after the War of Independence
- that the first American accumulated a fortune that would be
worth one million of today's dollars. The Founders and Framers
were, at best, what today would be called the
upper-middle-class in terms of lifestyle, assets, and
disposable income.

Even Charles and Mary Beard granted that wealth and
land-ownership were different things. Land, after all, didn't
have the scarcity it does today, and thus didn't have the same
value. Just about any free man could find land to settle,
either where Native Americans had been decimated by disease or
displaced by war.

In fact, with his Louisiana Purchase adding hundreds of
millions of acres to America, Jefferson even guaranteed that
the value of his own main asset - his land - and that of most
of his peers, would drop for the next several generations.

When George Washington wrote his will and freed his slaves on
his deathbed, he didn't have enough assets to buy the slaves
his wife had inherited and free them as well. Like Jefferson,
who died in bankruptcy, Washington was "rich" in land but poor
in cash.

In 1958, one of America's great professors of history, Forrest
McDonald, published an extraordinary book debunking Charles
Beard's 1913 hypothesis that the Constitution was created of,
by, and for rich white men. McDonald's book, titled "We the
People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution," bluntly
states that Beard's, "Economic interpretation of the
Constitution does not work."

Over the course of more than 400 meticulously researched
pages, McDonald goes back to original historical records and
reveals who was promoting and who was opposing the new
Constitution, and why. He is the first and only historian to
do this type of original-source research, and his conclusions
are startling.

McDonald notes that a quarter of all the delegates to the
Constitutional Convention had voted in their own state
legislatures for laws that would have helped debtors and the
poor and thus harmed the interests of the rich. "These [debt
relief/bankruptcy laws] were the very kinds of laws which,
according to Beard's hypothesis, the delegates had convened to
prevent," says McDonald. He adds: "Another fourth of the
delegates had important economic interests that were adversely
affected, directly and immediately, by the Constitution they
helped write."

While Beard theorized that the Framers of the Constitution
were largely drawn from the class of wealthy bankers and
businessmen, McDonald showed that, "The most common and by far
the most important property holdings of the delegates were
not, as Beard has asserted, mercantile, manufacturing, and
public security investments, but agricultural property." Most
were farmers or plantation owners, and owning a lot of land
did not make one rich in those days.

"Finally," McDonald concludes, "it is abundantly evident that
the delegates, once inside the convention, behaved as anything
but a consolidated economic group."

McDonald then goes into an exhaustive and detailed
state-by-state ana lysis of the state constitutional ratifying
conventions that finally brought the U.S. Constitution into
law. For example, in the State of Delaware, which voted for
ratification, "almost 77 percent of the delegates were
farmers, more than two-thirds of them small farmers with
incomes ranging from 75 cents to $5.00 a week. Only slightly
more than 23 percent of the delegates were professional men -
doctors, judges, and lawyers. None of the delegates was a
merchant, manufacturer, banker, or speculator in western lands."

In other states, similar numbers showed up. Of the New Jersey
delegates supporting ratification, 64.1 percent were small
farmers.

In Maryland, "the opponents of ratification included from
three to six times as large a proportion of merchants,
lawyers, and investors in shipping, confiscated estates, and
manufacturing as did the delegates who favored ratification."

In South Carolina it was those in economic distress who
carried the day: "No fewer than 82 percent of the debtors and
borrowers of paper money in the convention voted for
ratification." In New Hampshire, "of the known farmers in the
convention 68.7 percent favored ratification."

But did farmers support the Constitution because they were
slave owners or the wealthiest of the landowners, as Beard had
guessed back in 1913?

McDonald shows that this certainly wasn't the case in northern
states like New Hampshire or New Jersey, which were not slave
states. But what about Virginia and North Carolina, the two
largest slaveholding states, asks McDonald rhetorically. Were
their plantation owners favoring the Constitution because it
protected their economic and slaveholding interests?

"The opposite is true," writes McDonald. "In both states the
wealthy planters - those with personality interests [slaves]
as well as those without personality interests - were divided
approximately equally on the issue of ratification. In North
Carolina small farmers and debtors were likewise equally
divided, and in Virginia the great mass of the small farmers
and a large majority of the debtors favored ratification."

After dissecting the results of the ratification votes state
by state McDonald sums up: "Beard's thesis... is entirely
incompatible with the facts."

So what did motivate the Framers of the Constitution?

Along with the answer to this question, we may also find the
answer to another question historians have asked for two
centuries: Why was the Constitutional Convention held in
secret behind locked doors, and why did James Madison not
publish his own notes of the Convention until 1840, just after
the last of the other participants had died?

The reason, simply put, was that most of the wealthy men among
the delegates were betraying the interests of their own
economic class. They were voting for democracy instead of
oligarchy.

As with any political body, a few of the delegates, "a dozen
at the outside" according to McDonald, "clearly acted
according to the dictates of their personal economic interests."

But there were larger issues at stake. The people who hammered
out the Constitution had such a strong feeling of history and
destiny that it at times overwhelmed them.

They realized that in the seven-thousand-year history of what
they called civilization, only once before, in Athens - and
then only for the brief flicker of a few centuries - had
anything like a democracy ever been brought into existence and
survived more than a generation.

Their writings show that they truly believed they were doing
sacred work, something greater than themselves, their personal
interests, or even the narrow interests of their wealthy
constituents back in their home states.

They believed they were altering the course of world history,
and that if they got it right we could truly create a better
world.

Thus the secrecy, the locked doors, the intensity of the
Constitutional Convention. And thus the willingness to set
aside economic interest to produce a document - admittedly
imperfect - that would establish an enduring beacon of liberty
for the world.

As George Washington, who presided over the Constitutional
Convention, wrote to the nation on September 17, 1787 when
"transmitting the Constitution" to the people of the new
nation: "In all our deliberations on this subject we kept
steadily in our view, that which appears to us the greatest
interest of every true American, the consolidation of our
Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety,
perhaps our national existence."

He concluded with his "most ardent wish" was that the
Constitution "may promote the lasting welfare of that country
so dear to us all, and secure her freedom and happiness..."

Since the so-called "Reagan revolution" more than cut in half
the income taxes the multimillionaires and billionaires among
us pay, wealth has concentrated in America in ways not seen
since the era of the Robber Barons, or, before that,
pre-revolutionary colonial times. At the same time, poverty
has exploded and the middle class is under economic siege.

And now come the oligarchs - the most wealthy and powerful
families of America - lobbying Congress that they should
retain their stupefying levels of wealth and the power it
brings, generation after generation. They say that democracy
doesn't require a strong middle class, and that Jefferson was
wrong when he said that "overgrown wealth" could be "dangerous
to the State." They say that a permanent, hereditary,
aristocratically rich ruling class is actually a good thing
for the stability of society.

While a $1.5 million trigger for the estate tax is arguably
too low - particularly given the recent bubble in real estate
prices - that doesn't invalidate the concept of a democracy
defending itself against oligarchy. Set the trigger at 10
million, or fifty million. Make sure that family farms and
small businesses are protected. And make sure that people who
have worked hard and earned a lot of money can have children
and grandchildren and great-grandchildren who will live very
comfortably.

But let's also make sure that we don't end up like so many
Latin American countries, where a handful of super-rich
families rule their nations, and democracy is more show than
substance.

The Founders of our republic fought a war against an
aristocratic, oligarchic nation, and were very clear that they
didn't want America to ever degenerate into aristocracy,
oligarchy, or feudalism/fascism. We must hold to their vision
of an egalitarian, democratic republic.

Now the Estate Tax is before the Senate. Encourage your US
Senator to fight against mega-millionaire and US Senate leader
Bill Frist, and to keep the estate tax intact.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored
Award-winning best-selling author, and host of a nationally
syndicated daily progressive talk show, and a morning
progressive talk show on KPOJ in Portland, Oregon.
www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours
of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," "We The People,"
"The Edison Gene", and "What Would Jefferson Do?" 
__________________________________________________________________
Dr. Paul Patton
spring semster 2005
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Biology, Williams College
Williamstown, MA
phone: (413)-597-3518

Research Scientist
Beckman Institute  Rm 3027  405 N. Mathews St.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  Urbana, Illinois 61801
work phone: (217)-265-0795   fax: (217)-244-5180
home phone: (217)-344-5812
homepage: http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ppatton/www/index.html

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the
source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
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