Howard Zinn and Gordon Wood,
Contrasting Interpretations of the Founding Fathers
Were the Founding Fathers freedom loving radicals or conservative control freaks? Was the
America’s War for Independence a revolution that fundamentally transformed society or a wellorchestrated attempt by the colonial elite to preserve their power in the status quo? In the two
brief excerpts that follow, historians Howard Zinn and Gordon Wood offer dramatically different
interpretations of the motives behind the establishment of the United States and the ways in
which the Founding Fathers decisively affected the course of subsequent history.
Excerpt, Howard Zinn, “A Kind of Revolution,” 2005
Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery
that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found
that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they
could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British
Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and
create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.
When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and
the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the
centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in
modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of
combining paternalism with command . . .
Pauline Maier, who studied the development of opposition to Britain in the decade
before 1776 in her book From Resistance to Revolution, emphasizes the
moderation of the leadership and, despite their desire for resistance, their
"emphasis on order and restraint." She notes: "The officers and committee
members of the Sons of Liberty were drawn almost entirely from the middle and
upper classes of colonial society."
. . . To say that the Declaration of Independence, even by its own language, was
limited to life, liberty, and happiness for white males is not to denounce the
makers and signers of the Declaration for holding the ideas expected of privileged
males of the eighteenth century. Reformers and radicals, looking discontentedly at
history, are often accused of expecting too much from a past political epoch—and
sometimes they do. But the point of noting those outside the arc of human rights in
the Declaration is not, centuries late and pointlessly, to lay impossible moral
burdens on that time. It is to try to understand the way in which the Declaration
functioned to mobilize certain groups of Americans, ignoring others. Surely,
inspirational language to create a secure consensus is still used, in our time, to
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cover up serious conflicts of interest in that consensus, and to cover up, also, the
omission of large parts of the human race . . .
In America . . . the reality behind the words of the Declaration of Independence
(issued in the same year as Adam Smith's capitalist manifesto, The Wealth of
Nations) was that a rising class of important people needed to enlist on their side
enough Americans to defeat England, without disturbing too much the relations of
wealth and power that had developed over 150 years of colonial history. Indeed,
69 percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had held colonial
office under England . . .
To many Americans over the years, the Constitution drawn up in 1787 has
seemed a work of genius put together by wise, humane men who created a legal
framework for democracy and equality. This view is stated, a bit extravagantly, by
the historian George Bancroft, writing in the early nineteenth century:
The Constitution establishes nothing that interferes with equality and
individuality. It knows nothing of differences by descent, or opinions,
of favored classes, or legalized religion, or the political power of property.
It leaves the individual alongside of the individual . . . As the sea is made
up of drops, American society is composed of separate, free, and constantly
moving atoms, ever in reciprocal action ... so that the institutions and laws
of the country rise out of the masses of individual thought which, like the
waters of the ocean, are rolling evermore.
Another view of the Constitution was put forward early in the twentieth century by
the historian Charles Beard . . . in his book An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution . . . In short, Beard said, the rich must, in their own interest, either
control the government directly or control the laws by which government operates.
Beard applied this general idea to the Constitution, by studying the economic
backgrounds and political ideas of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia
in 1787 to draw up the Constitution. He found that a majority of them were lawyers
by profession, that most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves,
manufacturing, or shipping, that half of them had money loaned out at interest,
and that forty of the fifty-five held government bonds, according to the records of
the Treasury Department.
Thus, Beard found that most of the makers of the Constitution had some direct
economic interest in establishing a strong federal government: the manufacturers
needed protective tariffs; the moneylenders wanted to stop the use of paper
money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded
Indian lands; slaveowners needed federal security against slave revolts and
runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide
taxation, to pay off those bonds.
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Four groups, Beard noted, were not represented in the Constitutional Convention:
slaves, indentured servants, women, men without property. And so the
Constitution did not reflect the interests of those groups.
He wanted to make it clear that he did not think the Constitution was written
merely to benefit the Founding Fathers personally, although one could not ignore
the $150,000 fortune of Benjamin Franklin, the connections of Alexander Hamilton
to wealthy interests through his father-in-law and brother-in-law, the great slave
plantations of James Madison, the enormous landholdings of George Washington.
Rather, it was to benefit the groups the Founders represented, the "economic
interests they understood and felt in concrete, definite form through their own
personal experience."
Not everyone at the Philadelphia Convention fitted Beard's scheme. Elbridge
Gerry of Massachusetts was a holder of landed property, and yet he opposed the
ratification of the Constitution. Similarly, Luther Martin of Maryland, whose
ancestors had obtained large tracts of land in New Jersey, opposed ratification.
But, with a few exceptions, Beard found a strong connection between wealth and
support of the Constitution.
By 1787 there was not only a positive need for strong central government to
protect the large economic interests, but also immediate fear of rebellion by
discontented farmers. The chief event causing this fear was an uprising in the
summer of 1786 in western Massachusetts, known as Shays' Rebellion . . .
It was Thomas Jefferson, in France as ambassador at the time of Shays'
Rebellion, who spoke of such uprisings as healthy for society. In a letter to a friend
he wrote:
I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing . . . It is a medicine
necessary for the sound health of government . . . God forbid that we should
ever be twenty years without such a rebellion . . . The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural
manure.
But Jefferson was far from the scene. The political and economic elite of the
country were not so tolerant. They worried that the example might spread. A
veteran of Washington's army, General Henry Knox . . . wrote to Washington in
late 1786 about Shays' Rebellion, and in doing so expressed the thoughts of many
of the wealthy and powerful leaders of the country:
The people who are the insurgents . . . see the weakness of government;
they feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent, and their
own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to
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remedy the former. Their creed is "That the property of the United States
has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions
of all, and therefore ought to be the common properly of all. And he that
attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equity and justice and
ought to be swept from off the face of the earth.
Alexander Hamilton, aide to Washington during the war, was one of the most
forceful and astute leaders of the new aristocracy. He voiced his political
philosophy:
All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are
the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the
people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this
maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are
turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore
to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government . . . Can a
democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people be
supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body
can check the imprudence of democracy . . .
At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton suggested a President and Senate
chosen for life. The Convention did not take his suggestion. But neither did it
provide for popular elections, except in the case of the House of Representatives,
where the qualifications were set by the state legislatures (which required
property-holding for voting in almost all the states), and excluded women, Indians,
slaves. The Constitution provided for Senators to be elected by the state
legislators, for the President to be elected by electors chosen by the state
legislators, and for the Supreme Court to be appointed by the President.
The problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not, however,
the Constitutional limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in
the division of society into rich and poor. For if some people had great wealth and
great influence; if they had the land, the money, the newspapers, the church, the
educational system—how could voting, however broad, cut into such power?
There was still another problem: wasn't it the nature of representative government,
even when most broadly based, to be conservative, to prevent tumultuous
change?
. . . When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the
Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying
to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to
maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of
the people to ensure popular support.
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In the new government, Madison would belong to one party (the DemocratRepublicans) along with Jefferson and Monroe. Hamilton would belong to the rival
party (the Federalists) along with Washington and Adams. But both agreed—one
a slaveholder from Virginia, the other a merchant from New York—on the aims of
this new government they were establishing. They were anticipating the longfundamental agreement of the two political parties in the American system.
Hamilton wrote elsewhere in the Federalist Papers that the new Union would be
able "to repress domestic faction and insurrection." He referred directly to Shays'
Rebellion: "The tempestuous situation from which Massachusetts has scarcely
emerged evinces that dangers of this kind are not merely speculative."
The Constitution was a compromise between slaveholding interests of the South
and moneyed interests of the North. For the purpose of uniting the thirteen states
into one great market for commerce, the northern delegates wanted laws
regulating interstate commerce, and urged that such laws require only a majority
of Congress to pass. The South agreed to this, in return for allowing the trade in
slaves to continue for twenty years before being outlawed . . . Charles Beard
warned us that governments—including the government of the United States—are
not neutral, that they represent the dominant economic interests, and that their
constitutions are intended to serve these interests . . .
The Constitution, then, illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it
serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property
owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of
support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are
buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite
to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law-all made palatable
by the fanfare of patriotism and unity . . .
Were the Founding Fathers wise and just men trying to achieve a good balance?
In fact, they did not want a balance, except one, which kept things as they were, a
balance among the dominant forces at that time. They certainly did not want an
equal balance between slaves and masters, propertyless and property holders,
Indians and white. As many as half the people were not even considered by the
Founding Fathers as among Bailyn's "contending powers" in society. They were
not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the
Constitution, they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the
women of early America . . .
Source: Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, New York: Harper Perennial
Modern Classics (2005)
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Excerpt, Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991)
We Americans like to think of our revolution as not being radical; indeed, most of
the time we consider it downright conservative. It certainly does not appear to
resemble the revolutions of other nations in which people were killed, property
was destroyed, and everything was turned upside down. The American
revolutionary leaders do not fit our conventional image of revolutionaries—angry,
passionate, reckless, maybe even bloodthirsty for the sake of a cause. We can
think of Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao Zedong as revolutionaries, but not George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. They seem too stuffy, too
solemn, too cautious, too much the gentlemen. We cannot quite conceive of
revolutionaries in powdered hair and knee breeches. The American
revolutionaries seem to belong in drawing rooms or legislative halls, not in cellars
or in the streets. They made speeches, not bombs; they wrote learned pamphlets,
not manifestos. They were not abstract theorists and they were not social levelers.
They did not kill one another; they did not devour themselves. There was no reign
of terror in the American Revolution and no resultant dictator-no Cromwell, no
Bonaparte. The American Revolution does not seem to have the same kinds of
causes—the social wrongs, the class conflict, the impoverishment, the grossly
inequitable distributions of wealth—that presumably lie behind other revolutions.
There were no peasant uprisings, no jacqueries, no burning of chateaux, and no
storming of prisons.
Of course, there have been many historians—Progressive or neo-progressive
historians, as they have been called-who have sought, as Hannah Arendt put it,
"to interpret the American Revolution in the light of the French Revolution," and to
look for the same kinds of internal violence, class conflict, and social deprivation
that presumably lay behind the French Revolution and other modern revolutions.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century these Progressive historians have
formulated various social interpretations of the American Revolution essentially
designed to show that the Revolution, in Carl Becker's famous words, was not
only about "home rule" but also about "who was to rule at home.'" They have tried
to describe the Revolution essentially as a social struggle by deprived and
underprivileged groups against entrenched elites . . .
There should no longer be any doubt about it: the white American colonists were
not an oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial chains to throw off. In
fact, the colonists knew they were freer, more equal, more prosperous, and less
burdened with cumbersome feudal and monarchical restraints than any other part
of mankind in the eighteenth century. Such a situation, however, does not mean
that colonial society was not susceptible to revolution.
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Precisely because the impulses to revolution in eighteenth-century America bear
little or no resemblance to the impulses that presumably account for modern social
protests and revolutions, we have tended to think of the American Revolution as
having no social character, as having virtually nothing to do with the society, as
having no social causes and no social consequences. It has therefore often been
considered to be essentially an intellectual event, a constitutional defense of
American rights against British encroachments ("no taxation without
representation"), undertaken not to change the existing structure of society but to
preserve it. For some historians the Revolution seems to be little more than a
colonial rebellion or a war for independence. Even when we have recognized the
radicalism of the Revolution, we admit only a political, not a social radicalism. The
revolutionary leaders, it is said, were peculiar "eighteenth-century radicals
concerned, like the eighteenth century British radicals, not with the need to recast
the social order nor with the problems of the economic inequality and the
injustices of stratified societies but with the need to purify a corrupt constitutionand fight off the apparent growth of prerogative power.” Consequently, we have
generally described the Revolution as an unusually conservative affair, concerned
almost exclusively with politics and constitutional rights, and, in comparison with
the social radicalism of the other great revolutions of history, hardly a revolution at
all.
If we measure the radicalism of revolutions by the degree of social misery or
economic deprivation suffered, or by the number of people killed or manor houses
burned, then this conventional emphasis on the conservatism of the American
Revolution becomes true enough. But if we measure the radicalism by the amount
of social change that actually took place--by transformations in the relationships
that bound people to each other—then the American Revolution was not
conservative at all; on the contrary: it was as radical and as revolutionary as any in
history. Of course, the American Revolution was very different from other
revolutions. But it was no less radical and no less social for being different. In fact,
it was one of the greatest revolutions the world has known, a momentous
upheaval that not only fundamentally altered the character of American society but
decisively affected the course of subsequent history.
It was as radical and social as any revolution in history, but it was radical and
social in a very special eighteenth-century sense. No doubt many of the concerns
and much of the language of that pre-modern, pre-Marxian eighteenth century
were almost entirely political. That was because most people in that very different
distant world could not as yet conceive of society apart from government.
The social distinctions and economic deprivations that we today think of as the
consequence of class divisions, business exploitation, or various isms-capitalism,
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racism, etc.-were in the eighteenth century usually thought to be caused by the
abuses of government. Social honors, social distinctions, perquisites of office,
business contracts, privileges and monopolies, even excessive property and
wealth of various sorts-all social evils and social deprivations-in fact seemed to
flow from connections to government, in the end from connections to monarchical
authority. So that when Anglo-American radicals talked in what seems to be only
political terms purifying a corrupt constitution, eliminating courtiers, fighting off
crown power, and, most important, becoming republicans-they nevertheless had a
decidedly social message.
In our eyes the American revolutionaries appear to be absorbed in changing only
their governments, not their society. But in destroying monarchy and establishing
republics they were changing their society as well as their governments, and they
knew it. Only they did not know-they could scarcely have imagined how much of
their society they would change. J. Franklin Jameson, who more than two
generations ago described the Revolution as a social movement only to be
roundly criticized by a succeeding generation' of historians, was at least right
about one thing: "the stream of revolution, once started, could not be confined
within narrow banks, but spread abroad upon the land."
By the time the Revolution had run its course in the early nineteenth century,
American society had been radically and thoroughly transformed. One class did
not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationshipsthe way people were connected one to another-were changed, and decisively so.
By the early years of the nineteenth century the Revolution had created a society
fundamentally different from the colonial society of the eighteenth century. It was
in fact a new society unlike any that had ever existed anywhere in the world.
That revolution did more than legally create the United States; it transformed
American society. Because the story of America has turned out the way it has,
because the United States in the twentieth century has become the great power
that it is, it is difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate and recover fully the
insignificant and puny origins of the country. In 1760 America was only a collection
of disparate colonies huddled along a narrow strip of the Atlantic coasteconomically underdeveloped outposts existing on the very edges of the civilized
world. The less than two million monarchical subjects who lived in these colonies,
till took for granted that society was and ought to be a hierarchy of ranks and
degrees of dependency and that most people were bound together by personal
ties of one sort or another. Yet scarcely fifty years later these insignificant
borderland provinces had become a giant, almost continent-wide republic of
nearly ten million egalitarian-minded bustling citizens who not only had thrust
themselves into the vanguard of history but had fundamentally altered their society
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and their social relationships. Far from remaining monarchical, hierarchy-ridden
subjects on the margin of civilization, Americans had become, almost over night,
the most liberal, the most democratic, the most commercially minded, and the
most modern people in the world.
And this astonishing transformation took place without industrialization, without
urbanization, without railroads, without the aid of any of the great forces we
usually invoke to explain "modernization." It was the Revolution that was crucial to
this transformation. It was the Revolution, more than any other single event, that
made America into the most liberal, democratic, and modern nation in the world.
Of course, some nations of Western Europe likewise experienced great social
transformations and "democratic revolutions" in these same years. The American
Revolution was not unique; it was only different. Because of this shared Westernwide experience in democratization, it has been argued by more than one
historian that the broader social transformation that carried Americans from one
century and one kind of society to another was "inevitable" and "would have been
completed with or without the American Revolution." Therefore, this broader social
revolution should not be confused with the American Revolution. America, it is
said, would have emerged into the modern world as a liberal, democratic, and
capitalistic society even without the Revolution. One could, of course, say the
same thing about the relationship between the French Revolution and the
emergence of France in the nineteenth century as a liberal, democratic, and
capitalistic society; and indeed, much of the current revisionist historical writing on
the French Revolution is based on just such a distinction. But in America, no more
than in France, that was not the way it happened: the American Revolution and
the social transformation of America between 1760 and the early years of the
nineteenth century were inextricably bound together. Perhaps the social
transformation would have happened "in any case," but we will never know. It was
in fact linked to the Revolution; they occurred together. The American Revolution
was integral to the changes occurring in American society, politics, and culture at
the end of the eighteenth century.
These changes were radical, and they were extensive. To focus, as we are today
apt to do, on what the Revolution did not accomplish highlighting and lamenting its
failure to abolish slavery and change fundamentally the lot of women-is to miss
the great significance of what it did accomplish; indeed, the Revolution made
possible the anti-slavery and women's rights movements of the nineteenth century
and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking. The Revolution not only radically
changed the personal and social relationships of people, including the position of
women, but also destroyed aristocracy as it had been understood in the Western
world for at least two millennia. The Revolution brought respectability and even
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dominance to ordinary people long held in contempt and gave dignity to their
menial labor in a manner unprecedented in history and to a degree not equaled
elsewhere in the world. The Revolution did not just eliminate monarchy and create
republics; it actually reconstituted what Americans meant by public or state power
and brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics and a new kind of
democratic officeholder. The Revolution not only changed the culture of
Americans-making over their art, architecture, and iconography-but even altered
their understanding of history, knowledge, and truth. Most important, it made the
interests and prosperity of ordinary people-their pursuits of happiness-the goal of
society and government. The Revolution did not merely create a political and legal
environment conducive to economic expansion it also released powerful popular
entrepreneurial and commercial energies that few realized existed and
transformed the economic landscape of the country. In short, the Revolution was
the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history.
Source:
Gordon S. Wood, “Introduction,” The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 1991
QUESTIONS FOR CONSIDERATION:
Citing specific examples from the text, please write a detailed paragraph (5-7
sentences) for each of the following questions. Typed responses are due
the day of the hot seat or in-class discussion.
1.
What are the sharpest differences between the interpretations of
Zinn and Wood regarding the Founding Fathers and their motives?
Whom do you find most convincing and why?
2.
Was the American Revolution truly revolutionary? Why?
3.
Is America today a nation “of the people, by the people, for the
people,” or do special interests control the nation for themselves and
themselves only?
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