The Vexed Story of Capitalism Told by American Historians

In this most capitalistic country in world, scholars have a difficult time making precise just what social relations word, capitalism, refers to, not to mention to characterize its development across four centuries of American history. Once such taglines as was born free, rich and modern, came in first boats, and only energetic and ambitious migrated expressed shared assumptions undergirding metahistory of in United States. That story has almost been reversed recently with scenarios about colonists' traditionalism that could fit under rubic, how new world has become old and old world new. Either version is inadequate. More to point for members of SHEAR, this inadequacy leaves us bereft of a full understanding of early republic. I believe that insights of cultural history with its emphasis upon recovering meanings in past and exploring men and women communicated those meanings offers a promising way to reassess career of and its conceptual cousins, trade, commerce, and enterprise. I am approaching the vexed story of capitalism as an intellectual and historical phenomenon, involving myriad of convictions of those who wrote on subject at various times, as well as theories then available for analyzing economy and motives that may have prompted historians' work. Throughout I shall use term to designate a system that depends upon private property and relatively free use of it in economic endeavors. My definition points to scope of action given individuals for turning their property into capital by investing in production, an activity usually aimed at returning a profit and involving legal protection for hiring labor and selling goods and services in public and private. All of this takes place within a culture that rewards enterprise and rationalizes any untoward social consequences as price to be paid for material advance. Neither term nor system of figured in nineteenthcentury historical writings. That silence came to an end with publication in 1913 of Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of Constitution of United States. A bombshell of a book, this pathbreaking study irradiated a whole new landscape for researchers to dig into.' In it Beard charged that Constitution was neither a compact of states nor an organic product of American nation-building, but rather work of Revolution's moneyed leaders who had grown fearful of democracy. The limited suffrage in 1787, Beard said, had made it possible to rob people of their political voice. What Declaration of Independence had bestowed, Constitution took away. The Federalists' frame of government frustrated future reform too through a byzantine amendment process. Beard further asserted that holdings in cash, loans, and bonds, not real property in homes, shops, and farms of most American voters, had united men who pushed for Constitution's more perfect union. He thus separated economy of commercial agriculture-the of many-from investments of bankers and merchants-the of few-choreographing capitalism's entrance into American history through fancy footwork of an elite attentive to its vested interests. In compass of a very few pages Beard razed temple of Constitution worship and erected in its place a peep show through which one could see hidden forces at play at Philadelphia convention. Newly energized by this tantalizing thesis, researchers in following decades ferreted out scores of groups in colonial and post-independence America quarrelling with each over taxation, debt relief, land banks, paper money, stay laws, price controls, and bankruptcy statutes. Beard had been correct: common economic interests had created political coalitions. The difficulty came when one tried to connect these groups causally to major political decisions about declaring independence, ratifying Constitution, or joining Jeffersonian opposition

Capitalism · Political science · Politics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law

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