Franklin Roosevelt, eager to convince the public that the New Deal was not so new, but actually a “fulfillment of old and tested American ideals,” often argued publicly that the Founders did not understand property rights to be as important as other individual rights. Outside intellectual circles, however, the popular rhetoric of the Progressives has not openly attacked the Founders for their attachment to property rights rather, it has denied they had such an attachment. He criticized his contemporaries who failed to realize “how thoroughly Jeffersonian individualism must be abandoned for the benefit of a genuinely individual and social consummation.” ![]() In his book, The Promise of American Life (1909), Herbert Croly, the founder of The New Republic, argued that the Founders’ individualism had been appropriate to an agrarian pioneering nation, but was destructive to the modern industrial state, which needed vigorous direction from the national government. Milder “liberal” critics tended to focus their criticism not on the selfishness of the Founders, but on the infeasibility of their system in modern America. They accepted the mercantile image of life as an external battleground, and assumed the Hobbesian war of each against all. They thought man was a creature of rapacious self-interest, and yet they wanted him to be free-free, in essence, to contend, to engage in an umpired strife, to use property to get property. In his influential book, The American Political Tradition, Richard Hofstadter wrote: The harsher critics, beginning with Charles Beard, ascribed to the Founders selfish motives in establishing a constitution that provided generous protections for private property his claim was that the principal goal of such a constitution was to protect the wealthy elite against the democratic majority.īeard’s assertion has been coupled with the claim made by other scholars that not only were the Founders selfish, but they also understood all human beings to be primarily selfish, acquisitive creatures. Within intellectual circles, Progressives have tended both to acknowledge that the Founders attached great significance to property rights and to denigrate them precisely for this attachment. ![]() A salient feature of their efforts has been the promotion of new opinions concerning the American Founders and their appreciation for the importance of those rights. Progressives in the twentieth century have in large part aimed at turning the American people away from their traditional attachment to property rights. Garvey Fellowship program of the Independent Institute, Oakland, Calif. This article is adapted from the essay that won first prize in the 1997 Olive W. David Upham is a doctoral candidate in politics at the University of Dallas.
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