Author: Samuel G. Howard

Progressives looking for American roots for their ideals might shun the Revolutionary Period, instead drawing upon the Populist and Progressive Eras and the New Deal for inspiration. However, this a relatively shallow reading of the nation’s history, and one that plays into the hands of modern conservatives, who seek to present progressivism as an aberration hatched almost entirely in the mind of Karl Marx.

As I showed in Part 1, progressive ideals have been around at both the foundation of democracy in English and at the foundation of capitalism. Certainly, so have other tendencies, but these are the roots, and mighty trees have many roots.

At about the same time Adam Smith was publishing The Wealth of Nations, his fellow Englishman Thomas Paine was publishing Common Sense. Lately, this pamphlet has been picked up by Glenn Beck and other such folks, claiming that in it, Paine acknowledges all of their complaints with the federal government and would completely support them. Unlikely. Paine was a radical democrat, who was the odd-man out among the Founding Fathers. Virtually alone among them, Paine said that the average person should be allowed to vote; and thus Common Sense, with such calls for universal (white) male enfranchisement, was a powerful tool to rally Americans to the cause of what were mostly well-to-do men who had no intention of allowing them to vote. Modern-day conservatives, some of whom are calling for instituting property requirements and the return of indirect election of Senators, would be hard-pressed to find support from Paine.

Paine was beyond even the mere enfranchisement of citizens though. Below, from Paine’s Agrarian Justice:

[21] Having thus in a few words, opened the merits of the case, I shall now proceed to the plan I have to propose, which is,

[22] To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property:

[23] And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.

–Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice

Paine regarded property rights as impermanent. Paine also utilized the second suggestion in Rights of Man. He also suggested this before discussing those in old age (for the time):

…pay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under fourteen years of age; enjoining the parents of such children to send them to school, to learn reading, writing, and common arithmetic…

By adopting this method, not only the poverty of the parents will be relieved, but ignorance will be banished from the rising generation, and the number of poor will hereafter become less, because their abilities, by the aid of education, will be greater. Many a youth, with good natural genius, who is apprenticed to a mechanical trade, such as a carpenter, joiner, millwright, shipwright, blacksmith, etc., is prevented getting forward the whole of his life from the want of a little common education when a boy.

–Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

Paine was severely different from the rest of the Founders, but because of the relatively shallow reading of history we presume that all founders were monolithic in their ideals and reasons (though they were mostly drawn from a rich merchant class). Thus, in our reading of history, we go Revolution-Article of Confederation Period-Constitution. We get the briefest mentions of Shays’ and the Whiskey Rebellions, and then briefly glance over the anonymous Anti-Federalists. Sometimes, we don’t even pause on the years between the end of the Revolution and the beginning of the Philadelphia Convention, almost as though the Founders immediately sat down to write the Constitution right after they signed the Treaty of Paris. John Adams’ view of Common Sense? “A poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass.”

To get a sense of how different Paine’s view of government was, here’s his version of how the country should’ve been arranged from Common Sense (Paine also called for the direct election of justices, but that’s not visible):

I think some of it is really quite confusing, and not everything I like. None it of it was considered at Philadelphia. In contrast, here’s James Madison’s Virginia Plan:

Which gets me on to Madison. Lately picked up as a hero of the right, Madison is perhaps famous as a man who advocated against the excesses of government. The Federalist Papers; published by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay; have become useful tools for the right in their arguments for states’ rights and limited federal government. If you’re looking at the Virginia Plan above, maybe something leaps out at you right away which might seem to contradict it. If you can’t spot it, I’ll point it out: Madison advocated for federal veto powers over state laws. That should be enough to strike him from the hearts of any states’ righter.

That the Federalist Papers are even utilized by the right is an interesting feat of intellectual blindness. Considering that 51 of them were written by Alexander Hamilton, versus 26 for Madison and just five by Jay, one wonders why those looking for limited federal government are using arguments advanced by the strongest proponent of centralized government in the fledgling republic. Perhaps, because the Federal Papers are intended to convince the Anti-Federalists that the changes wrought by Madison’s beloved commerce clause and the new Constitution are not really the radical changes from the Articles of Confederation that they actually were.

It’s difficult for any movement to align itself with folks like the Anti-Federalists; though I don’t think it’s impossible. But it’s clear to me that the Founders largely ignored the ideals that Paine used to inspire the masses to revolution in favor an exclusive form of republican democracy. The Founders that stand greatest in our minds today were all flawed individuals; largely because they were humans, not gods; despite their virtual ascension to such status. Those that are forgotten generally lacked good P.R. people.

But the most forgotten in the early republic are the most interesting. I intended this part to end my writing, but given the current length, I’ll stop here and return to the rebellions in the next part.

“…10. Tenthly, that you will take some speedy and effectual course to relieve all such prisoners for debt as are altogether unable to pay, that they may not perish in prison through the hard-heartedness of their creditors; and that all such who have any estates may be enforced to make payment accordingly, and not shelter themselves in prison to defraud their creditors…

…12. Twelfthly, that you will provide some powerful means to keep men, women, and children from begging and wickedness, that this nation may be no longer a shame to Christianity therein…”

-From the Large Petition to Parliament, 1647; Most prominent author: William Walwyn

The above was written during the English Civil War, by members of the group known to history as the Levellers. The Levellers had a radical idea: that government derived its legitimacy from the people, and thus that the supreme part of government was not the King or the House of Lords, but the House of Commons which was the assembly of the representatives of the people. Taken as a whole, the works of the Levellers were perhaps the first coherent and dominant tracts about democracy in the English language. Their works were highly popular with the parliamentarian New Model Army (one tract was entitled The Case of the Army, Truly Stated), which led to their challenging Oliver Cromwell. Eventually, Cromwell dealt with them the way King Charles I dealt with them; prison and murder.

We have trouble conceiving of the past without thinking about it in terms of the present. Thus we don’t realize the effects the English Civil War had on government and philosophy. Besides the Levellers, the Diggers came along (sort of proto-socialists); more famously, both John Locke and Thomas Hobbes are highly influenced by the war. We also can’t realize that the English were rapidly shifting from a feudal society that viewed anyone utilizing market forces to enrich themselves as sinful to a mercantile society that was the foundation for what became capitalism. When we learn the history, we largely de-emphasize or ignore the Agricultural Revolution that preceded the Industrial Revolution; the former freed up millions of people for the latter.

It’s important to understand that the two demands above weren’t just separate from a host of other social justice demands, they also fit into a larger body of work (along with An Agreement of the People) that expressed democratic thought in an era where the use of the word “democracy” was akin to calling someone an anarchist. Expressed from highly pious and Christian position, at the very beginning, the case for democracy included a mandate for government to take care of the less fortunate. To include that in our demands about the purview of the government should not be as radical as it was over three hundred years ago; yet many persist in making it so.

…”the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life… But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”

“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

-Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations

In the first quote above, Adam Smith describes what Karl Marx would eventually call “alienation” as an effect of the division of labor. Rereading it, you can see the natural elitism of Smith, but that doesn’t really make him any different from any other theorist of his times. The reality about Marx (besides that he was often wrong) is that most of his critiques of capitalism existed prior to him writing them down. They were made often by Christians who viewed capitalism as a real danger to the social fabric of the people’s lives. The Chartists in England made many critiques of the capitalism they saw about a decade before Marx set down to writing. In the fog of history though, when we get to these views, we label them all as “Marxist” or “socialist” or “communist”. Anti-capitalism has existed as long as capitalism. Its critiques are right there besides its birth.

More interesting to me is the second quote, which many read as an argument for progressive taxation (I find it hard not to read it that way). Taken with the first quote, it seems to advocate government spending and programs to assist the poor. Why, almost a redistribution of wealth. In the very foundational text of capitalism. Odd.

Governor Lincoln Chafee has before him a plan to end homelessness. The General Assembly has before it progressive taxation as well as quite a few bills aimed at assisting the less fortunate. These are in keeping with the foundational mandates of both democracy and capitalism. Perhaps we should determine whether we continue with this system, or whether we should abandon them for a more sinister version of each.

Part 2 is forthcoming. Hints: Common Sense and Whiskey.