Max M. Edling

Alexander Hamilton's Fiscal Reform : Transforming the Structure of Taxation in the Early Republic

Alexander Hamiltons Fiscal Reform : Transforming the Structure of Taxation in the Early Republic

Introduction to the Centennial Symposium on Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation

This year marks the centennial of Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). The initial response to the book gave little indication that it would still be around 100 years after publication. For one thing, it never sold well. Beard sold an impressive 11 million copies of his many single and coauthored histories of the United States. An Economic Interpretation sold less than 8,000 copies and was not aimed at the popular market (Beale 1954, 310–12). Nor were Beard’s academic peers particularly enthusiastic about his new work. Orin Libby accused the book of “lack of perspective” and the author of demagogy (1914, 114–16). In the American Political Science Review, John Latané concluded that Beard “signally fails to prove his main theses” (1913, 698). Like Libby, he found the author driven not by historical curiosity but by a present-minded agenda. If few took Beard’s evidence seriously in 1913, the systematic debunking of his work had to await the labors of Robert Brown and Forest McDonald in the 1950s (Brown 1956; McDonald 1958), when Beard’s book had achieved canonical status. By 1969, Gordon Wood, whose Creation of the American Republic remains the standard work on the American founding, remarked that “it seems obvious by now that Beard’s notion that men’s property holdings, particularly personalty holdings, determined their ideas and their behavior was so crude that no further time should be spent on it” (Wood 1969, 626). Nevertheless, much like the lead character in the feature film The Big Lebowski, somehow Charles Beard abides. In a work contemporary with Wood’s, Richard Hofstadter accurately pinpointed “Beard’s most enduring triumph: he no longer persuades, but he still sets the terms of the debate, even for those who are least persuaded” (1968,