2. Review of Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists

2. Review of Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists

April 23, 1962

Mr. Kenneth S. Templeton, Jr.

William Volker Fund

Burlingame, California

Dear Ken:

Jackson Turner Main’s The Antifederalists is a desperate, chaotic rearguard action on behalf of the Beard-Jensen “class struggle” interpretation of the adoption of the Constitution.¹⁰ The “orthodox” [Charles A.] Beard-[Carl L.] Becker-[Merrill M.] Jensen view has been riddled from all sides in recent years, for the revolutionary and later periods. Main attempts to restate the old shibboleths while still defending them from the “revisionist” attacks.

The result is a tangle of confusion and chaos. Time and time again, Main stubbornly affirms the essentials of the class-struggle view: that the Constitution was an imposition of the “well born” and the “few” against the small farmers and the “many”; of the “creditor class” against the “debtors”; of the urban against the rural, etc. And yet, in each case he is continually forced to admit grave exceptions and concessions, until the “class struggle” viewpoint becomes a desperate shibboleth rather than a conclusion from the facts. The whole book impresses me as a struggle by Main to maintain his fallacious a priori categories in the face of the recalcitrant historical facts.

All the old absurdities are yet revived: e.g., that the anti-Federalists were in favor of paper money (the “debtor classes”) even though many of the leaders were against it, etc. And so, if Main grudgingly admits that the anti-Federalist leaders were wealthy, well, then, their followers were poor, small farmerish, etc. If he admits that the urban masses—the mechanics, artisans, etc.—were pro-Federalist as well as the merchants, well, then, the “class struggle” is modified, so that while the whole struggle is one of poor vs. rich, it turns out that the urban poor were enlisted in the “rich” group, etc. Many states simply do not fit at all.

It is remarkable that Main is able to drag in all of these class-struggle interpretations even though he also admits that they are mutually contradictory: the urban poor among the rich, the rich debtors who favored paper money, etc. In his desperate attempt to salvage the class-struggle thesis, Main adds yet another “class” and class struggle to this chaotic mélange: the “mercantile community.”

The “mercantile community,” led by the wicked merchants, includes all the urban people (although somehow at least the physicians were anti-Federalist) plus the farmers, big and small (although he tries to maintain that in essence they were big), who live in the trade-centered river valleys vs. the “self-sufficient” community of subsistence farmers. Why the entire “mercantile community” is supposed to form one “class” or economic interest group, is never really explained, nor is it explained why they should all be pro-Constitution. Nor is the “self-sufficient” interest in proposing the Constitution, explained—the shibboleths about “democracy,” “aristocracy,” etc., which Main tosses around continually, explain nothing here.

Forrest McDonald has shown in his We the People that the self-sufficient farmers could be said to have economic interest both for and against the Constitution, depending on the state involved, and that the merchants, much less the catch-all “mercantile community,” must be split up into numerous different interest groups if one wants to talk of mercantile interests intelligibly.

Similarly, Main’s hobbyhorse “democracy” is another vague, catchall, ill-defined concept (in fact, never defined by Main) that he sees as the key to the anti-Federalist position, in a struggle against the “few” and “aristocracy.” These concepts are peculiarly ill fitting to the times and irrelevant to the main struggle over the Constitution—which is over centralized power vs. states’ rights, and not over “democracy” vs. the “few”—as well as slippery and undefined.

Main, typical of his continuing war with the facts, admits that the word “democracy” was used but seldom by the anti-Federalists, but explains it away as a tactic to disarm the opposition. Again, the leaders—or some leaders—are conceded not to be concerned with democracy, but the followers are supposed to be. But the leaders were the ones who articulated the position, which leaves Main’s position a rather mystical one. Indeed, if both groups were led by wealthy and eminent men—as is true of every broad-based movement in politics—and the followers are poor, what happens to the struggle for “democracy” vs. “aristocracy” or the quasi-Marxian struggle of rich vs. poor?

Main also links egalitarianism in with “democracy,” even though there is almost no evidence of egalitarian views either. For “proof” of his contentions, Main is reduced to isolated quotations by one writer or another, denouncing the opposition as being a “rabble” or by someone talking of the “middling interest” or the “well-born.”

Naturally, in every country and every age, there are well-born, poor, and people in between. And if one wants to separate them into “classes,” one can spend one’s time doing so, though fruitlessly. But so are there an infinite number of other “classes” in society: occupational groups, religious groups, chess players and non-chess players, etc. The reason why Jack Main insists on proliferating and imposing his “class” schema on the events is that he insists that these classes are inherently in conflict: that the “class interests” of the various groups are innately at loggerheads; that the small property owners are innately in conflict of interest with the large property owners, that the merchants and farmers are inherently at odds, that creditors and debtors form distinct antagonistic “classes,” etc.

This is the a priori mistake, the methodological fallacy, that sets Jackson Main in quasi-Marxistical and perpetual war with the facts, trying desperately to fit recalcitrant reality into his supposedly conflicting class categories. All of this would be swept away if he realized that these classes—and all other classes, for that matter—are not inherently conflicting, that if they have anything to do with each other at all, it is, objectively, a peaceful harmony, a peaceful, productive, voluntary network of trade and exchanges, linking all individuals—and individuals are the primary reality, not the constructed “classes”—into the mutually advantageous free market.

Also, in Marxist manner, Main, while dealing slightly with the libertarian, anti-central power aspect of anti-Federalism, tends to dismiss it brusquely as a “rationalization” of class interest, and subordinate also to “democracy” and egalitarianism.

Actually, there is a small nub of truth in the class-struggle thesis, and its attempted application to the Revolution-Constitution period by Beard. The nub of truth has been twisted by the Marxists and neo-Marxist historians, indeed by Marx himself. Marx postulated that there are inherently conflicting classes within society, within the market, as well as outside it, and that their evolution through conflict was determined by “laws of history.” (Beard, the Populist historians, etc. use the class and class-conflict analysis of history without necessarily accepting the “laws of history” prophesying.) But Marx acquired his class theory from Saint-Simon, who, in turn, garbled and twisted it from its original thesis, which was, in contrast, highly libertarian.

This thesis—which Mises would call a caste-conflict theory—and which anticipated its modern formulation by Albert Jay Nock, was developed by Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte in the immediate Restoration period in France. This postulated two essential “classes” or castes: the State, and its subsidized favorites; and the public, who are exploited by the State.

This was the original “class” analysis and exploitation analysis; the State, and its subsidizees, exploited the producing public. The producers included everyone on the free market, from manufacturers to laborers. Saint-Simon, Marx, etc. twisted this around to add the “capitalists” to the list of exploiters and to dub the “producers” as only the proletariat. The only remnant of Beardian hypothesis that has interest, therefore, is when he concentrated, e.g., on the class (caste) interest of veteran army officers in federal government pensions or on the interests of government security holders. (Here the empirical importance of security holders has turned out to be negligible for the Constitution but at least the hypothesis was cogent. However, there appears to be much more foundation for government security-holder interest behind the Hamiltonian debt-assumption program—a much more direct causation, of course, than in considering the Constitution as a whole.)

To do a completely thorough evaluation of the book would require detailed checking of the sources, detailed comparison and contrast of Main and McDonald, more reading on the Main-McDonald controversy, etc. But the whoppers are plentiful enough to say that this book is hopeless as any sort of significant grappling with the problem.

Contrast to this tangle the brilliant and incisive article of Professor Cecilia Kenyon, “Men of Little Faith.”¹¹ Kenyon, not shackled by Marxist categories, sees clearly and demonstrates incisively that the anti-Federalists were essentially not “democrats” or egalitarians or wild-eyed rebels, but basically libertarian types, who feared and disliked the increased centralization of State power (via control of commerce, new federal taxes, “general welfare,” etc.) manifesting itself in the new Constitution. Here, in the ideological realm, and in the problem of liberty vs. more central power, is the nub of the conflict. And while Kenyon of course defends the central power and chides the anti-Federalists as being “men of little faith” in the new opportunities of bigger government, the reputation of the anti-Federalists is in better hands with their opponent, Kenyon, than with their ardent supporter, Professor Main.