[Mb-civic] How Rich is Too Rich For Democracy?

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0418-21.htm

Published on Monday, April 18, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
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?"

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