Libby, that perhaps the framers of the Constitution had been an alliance of commercial classes more than a virtuous convocation of statesmen. Beard pushed the class analysis even further, depicting the framers as a self-interested clique of bondholders. The implications were obvious. If the Constitution fashioned in primarily served the class alliances of its time and its authors, then its institutional apparatus could be tinkered with or even thrown aside as decrepit in its very mode of operation as well as its unfortunate results.
It was not a coincidence that the years between and saw constitutional amendments permitting the income tax, establishing the direct popular election of U. The backlash to Beard helped send an Ohio newspaper editor and former lieutenant governor named Warren G. Harding to a Senate seat and eventually the White House in Despite the backlash in the political realm, Progressive approaches to history, including critical approaches to most of the American past, dominated younger and intellectual circles for a generation, surviving in the work of historians like Arthur Schlesinger, Sr.
It helped, as Staughton Lynd later pointed out, that Beard and his followers did little to question what Frederick Douglass and W. In this scheme, slaveholding Southern planters and their descendants might be relied upon to lead yeomen small property holders against the capitalists. According to the first wave of Progressive historians, the Constitution primarily served the class alliances of its time and its authors. But the intellectual prominence of the Progressives finally faded, too, beginning in the s.
In the middle of a burgeoning Cold War, it proved useful to see the American past as a story of well-meaning colonists taking up arms against the dominant empire of their day, especially as the United States seemed to be on the rise, not falling into corruption or decline. From this perspective, it was the Americans, including the framers of the Constitution, who were provincials, the colonized rather than colonizers, the underdogs who got out from under British dominance.
Maybe they even saved the West and its traditions from corruption and imperial overreach. Ever Oedipal, young historians began to make their name by attacking the pieties of their Progressive forebears. Not coincidentally, the U. The Progressives had been like the Populists, the argument went—their lame, homegrown quasi-socialism exposing them to be provincial rubes and fellow-traveling ideologues at once.
The American Revolution and the Constitution were, in fact, worthy of celebration. The truths were held self-evident again. That study won acclaim for highlighting the intellectual and practical dilemmas of republicanism and for seeming to split the difference between celebration and criticism of the founders. In this, the young Wood performed a scholarly triple axel.
At great length and sophistication, he had offered something to those inclined to celebrate the Constitution, those who criticized it, and those looking for some way between. The republic, simply put, was moderate yet innovative, advanced yet caught up in self-deception. For his part, Wood got tenure at Brown, and after winning a Pulitzer for his second book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution , he became known for complaining publicly about his left-leaning and multiculturalist colleagues and for the plaudits he received from Newt Gingrich, who distributed the book to rookie House members.
On other occasions, Wood descends into explicit red-baiting, as in his reviews of The Unknown American Revolution , the career-summing work of the late Gary B. Wood begins with Tom Paine, who used to be exiled from the elite pack of founders for being too radical and plebian not to mention his shilling for the French Revolution.
For Wood, the essence of the American experiment lay in a constitutional process that leads to fundamental laws that have popular sanction. The exceptionalism here is not even thinly veiled; what to Paine had been propaganda and exhortation in Wood becomes a statement of fact. Paine, at least, felt constrained to make some actual comparisons. Key imperialists, however, discerned that the real issue was sovereignty, and not just what parts of it resided with the king or parliament.
Again and again, Wood invents a radicalism that is about anything but nationalism and everything but material interests—all in the name of doing history rather than politics. Thus we come to one of the climaxes of the book. In this account, the Americans practically invent the notion of written constitutions as fundamental law, to the extent of establishing, as Paine had forecasted, intermediate elected bodies conventions to write them and special elections to ratify them.
These constitutions dismantled executive power, isolated and lessened judiciary powers, and empowered legislatures as the most representative and democratic part of government, while tentatively moving toward bicameralism as a check against democratic excess. Nevertheless, the federal structure that barely got the new nation through the war was not up to coordinating these thirteen newly empowered states in a hostile world. Wood is saying there really was too much democracy in the American Revolution.
On this point, Wood predictably fails to engage the work of Woody Holton , Barbara Clark Smith , and Terry Bouton , who argued convincingly, in three important books published a dozen years ago, that the political crisis over taxation in the s reflected less demagoguery than profit-seeking by a threatened gentry class of mushroom patriots who no longer worried much about the inflation-driven travails of their neighbors.
Progressive history got a lot more careful and convincing in this third, twenty-first century wave, but Wood has ignored all of it. Even to suggest such a thing amounts to treason. The federal Constitution, in other words, took what was good and stable in the state constitutions and left the dangerous democratic tendencies out.
Yet he makes this claim only to justify segregating slavery into a separate chapter in which he contextualizes the subject into irrelevance. Slavery can be an issue so long as it makes clear that the Founders were noble. At the same time, judge-interpreted laws placed legal boundaries around property and contracts. His confident celebration of the judiciary at a moment when public confidence in the Supreme Court not to mention law enforcement may be the lowest it has been since none other than the Progressive Era seems at best a tinny echo from the past, at worst the unfortunate result of the praise he has received over the years from law school professors who can agree only on that one thing: constitutionalism as the American Way.
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Sign up for Nature Briefing. Search Search articles by subject, keyword or author. So that's what he did, saying he finally walked about 22, miles before returning home. While he was away his parents died and he didn't find out until he came home. Ken walked the length of Britain and was at Rannoch in the Scottish Highlands when he suddenly thought of his parents and started to cry.
I looked across the loch and saw this woodland. Ken says that was the point when he stopped crying and ended his constant wandering. He set about building a log cabin, having first experimented on the design by using small sticks. Four decades on, the cabin has a roaring log fire but no electricity, gas or running water - and definitely no mobile phone signal.
The firewood has to be chopped in the forest and carried back to the remote shelter. He grows vegetables and forages for berries but his main source of food comes from the loch. Ten days after film director Lizzie left the cabin, in February , the perils of Ken's isolated existence were brought home when he suffered a stroke while outside in the snow. He used a GPS personal locator beacon, which he had been given days before, to trigger an SOS, which was automatically sent to a response centre in Houston, Texas.
It notified the coastguard in the UK and Ken was airlifted to hospital in Fort William where he spent seven weeks recovering. Staff did what they could to make sure he could return to living independently and doctors tried to get him to move back to civilisation where he would have a flat and carers.
But Ken just wanted to get back to his cabin.
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