The Value of the Founding Fathers’
Intentions
Based on Charles Beard’s Definition of Mal-Intent
Alex Thorn
09.20.04
John Geer Political Science 100
Assessing the nobility or ethical quality of the founding fathers’ intentions requires a major clarification: to whose criteria of what constitutes a “noble intention” are the founding fathers being compared? Because Charles Beard[1] is one of the key opponents of deifying the founding fathers, his argument stands as solid ground for comparison. If the fathers had intended, as Beard suggests, to centralize power to the federal government in order to protect their own money and interests from the masses, then the document they authored would have created an elitist government, not one that was able to adapt and grow to accept new constituencies. The founding fathers’ understanding that the times would change and that therefore amendments would be necessary, coupled with their creation of the “checks and balances system,” to protect those changing rights and laws from tyranny, has performed time and time again in the best interest of the people. There is a reason why our Constitution is the oldest of its kind: it’s because the founding fathers created the Constitution with the ability to evolve and move forward without undermining the original principles it was founded on. Time and time again, the document has proved grounded in its original ideals, yet dynamic in its ability to adapt. Thus, whether the intentions of the founding fathers were in fact noble or not seems irrelevant, for the actual product of their intentions has proved exceedingly good.
The most important pieces that must be considered when judging the quality of the founding fathers intentions are the creations of the “checks and balances” and amendment systems. In the first three articles of the Constitution, the fathers outline just how much power each branch of the government would have, leaving each branch subject to overrule by another. In doing so, the fathers made it impossible for one branch to rule the entire government, thus protecting future generations from an elitist or totalitarian government. In the Article 5, the fathers recognized both their own insufficiencies in drafting the Constitution and the need to adapt the document to the future. In doing so, the fathers left the document open to change. Because of the amendment process that the fathers wrote, the nation has constantly been in a state of forward progress. In fact, less than a century after the fathers refused to rule on slavery, African Americans earned the right to suffrage, regardless of social or economic status.[2] The government’s ability to adapt its definition of constituency without degrading the integrity of the original Constitution has kept the nation egalitarian. These two pieces are pivotal to both the American democracy and understanding the noble intentions of the founding fathers.
It is true that the Constitution represents a step back from the anarchy, and therefore from the democratic freedoms, created by the Articles of Confederation. In doing so, the fathers were forced to create a less democratic government in response to the entirely free society under the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution created a President that is not directly elected, Senators and Supreme Court Justices who were appointed, and a Congress with the ability to enact martial law, raise armies to put down insurgencies, regulate interstate commerce and tax. Beard argues that all these limitations on individual freedom prove the fathers’ intention to keep power from the masses and maintain their own social and economic standing. However, it is clear that each of these powers granted to the federal government were justifiable reactions to the anarchy created by the Articles of Confederation. The fathers sought not to maintain their own status, but correct the mistakes made by the authors of the first document. They realized that though the Articles of Confederation granted more individual freedom and was more democratic, it gave too little power to the federal government to protect those individual freedoms. Thus, simply because the fathers intended to author a document that had many undemocratic pieces to it does not mean that they were bad or not noble to do so.
In fact, the
fathers understanding of the line between “majority rules” and tyranny has
proved to be genius time and time again, especially in facilitating changes in
civil rights. On
Finally, a major
point of Beard’s argument is that all the founding fathers were wealthy and
that, in creating a centralized government that withheld some power from the
public, they sought to protect their own economic and social standing.[5] If
the demographics had been more diverse, Beard’s argument implies, the
Constitution would have been more democratic. However, it was a fact of the
time during which the Constitution was written that those who could afford an
education were white and wealthy: only men with property were even considered
members of the constituency. Ellis articulates this phenomenon when he says
that the fathers in no way constituted an aristocracy, at least compared to
Essentially, it is impossible to judge the actual intentions, or motivations, of the founding fathers. The only way to do so, in fact, would be to examine the actual document they created, but doing so inherently means looking not at their intentions, but at their actual product. Further, not only is it impossible to judge their intentions, but any weighing of the founding fathers’ motivations proves irrelevant, because the actual outcome of their work was a document that has steered the United States down the path of forward progress in nearly every endeavor. Moreover, any individual wealth that the founding fathers gained from the Constitution was directly tied to the prosperity of the nation, and thus, their opulence can be seen as nothing more than a positive side effect of a national benefit. All of the undemocratic pieces of the Constitution to which Beard takes offense were necessary at least during the time after the Articles of Confederation. And, those pieces that were necessary only at the time (or those which proved unnecessary altogether) were abolished, revised, or added to by future amendments.[8] As it is impossible to judge the actual intentions of the founding fathers (because it’s impossible for anyone to know exactly what they were planning), the only way to judge the quality of their intentions is through their actual product, which, as has been proved, was clearly created with the greater and future good of the United States in mind.
Works Cited / Bibliography
Brown v. Board of Education, 347
Ellis, Joseph. Founding
Brothers.
Fiorina, Morris and
Peterson, Paul. The New American Democracy. 3rd Alt. Ed.
Geer, John. Lecture: Is
the Constitution democratic or not?
“The 1963 Inaugural
Address of Governor George C. Wallace.”
[1] Charles
Beard heavily criticized the intentions of the founding fathers in his book, An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution of the United States.
[2] 15th Amendment.
[3] Brown v.
Board of Education, 347
[4] “The 1963 Inaugural Address of Governor George
C. Wallace.”
[5] Geer,
John. Lecture: Is the Constitution
democratic or not?
[6] Ellis, 13
[7] Geer,
John. Lecture: Is the Constitution
democratic or not?
[8] A good
example of this is the 17th Amendment. Article 1, Section 3 of the
Constitution, states that “The Senate of the