Philadelphia’s Forgotten
Spirit of 1776
By
Sam Pizzigati for the Campaign for America's Future Blog
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| There was a time when the right to vote belonged only to white, property-owning men. |
EDITOR’S
NOTE: In Charlestown, the controlling Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA Party)
and its now defunct parent, the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition, long held
that owning
property should give you the right to vote whether you call Charlestown
your home or not.
Echoing the writers of the US Constitution, they call it “taxation
without representation” to deny non-residents the right to vote. But is that
what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Read on. - W. Collette
Later
this summer, just a few weeks after this year’s Fourth of July celebrations,
Democrats will be gathering in Philadelphia to make some presidential
nomination history.
Democrats — small-d variety — gathered
in Philadelphia soon after the original Fourth of July, too. Those democrats,
all Pennsylvanians, also had some history to make. In September 1776, they
would go on to adopt their new nation’s most egalitarian state constitution.
Before the Revolution, only men of
property in Pennsylvania could vote and hold office. The new state
constitution, notes historian Clement Fatovic in his recently published “America’s Founding
and the Struggle over Economic Inequality,” totally removed property
qualifications for voting and office-holding.
In the new and free Pennsylvania,
declared teacher and mathematician James Cannon, “overgrown rich Men will be
improper to be trusted.”
Many citizens of the new
Pennsylvanian “commonwealth” wanted this sort of egalitarian sensibility
expressly written into their new constitution.
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| Rhode Island was the last state to hold out from abolishing suffrage based on property ownership, leading to the famous 1841-2 Dorr War, an armed rebellion to change state policy. Though the "war" failed, their central demand became law, although women and Narragansett Indians were expressly denied the right to vote. |
The final constitution adopted didn’t
carry that exact language. But Pennsylvania’s new state government did move
quickly to discourage grand fortune. Before the end of 1776, the state had a
progressive tax code that placed a new levy on the speculative holdings of rich
Pennsylvanians.
A few years later, after the Revolution,
lawmakers in the Pennsylvania Assembly carried that same spirit into the debate
over a newly created state bank that many saw as concentrating the state’s
wealth in the hands of a few.
“The accumulation of enormous wealth,”
the official Assembly committee statement against the powerful bankers ran,
“will necessarily produce a degree of influence and power, which cannot be
intrusted in the hands of any set of men whatsoever, without endangering public
safety.”
A year later, the controversial state
bank would see its charter revoked.
The Pennsylvania crackdown on
concentrating wealth reflected a widespread agreement throughout the former 13
colonies that their new nation needed to become a much more equal place.
Large landowners, merchants, and
affluent lawyers had dominated the political life of the British colonies.
These powers-that-be expected farmers, artisans, and other laborers to know
their place.
But the struggle for independence upset
this “politics of deference.” The colonial elites, explains historian Clement
Fatovic, found it “more and more difficult” to reconcile “great disparities of
wealth with the animating principles of the Revolution.”
In this new political environment,
relates Fatovic, economic inequality would become “a pervasive topic in
legislative debates, newspaper articles, political pamphlets, private
correspondence, religious sermons, public orations, and official addresses.”
Basic rights like a free press and trial
by jury, proclaimed Noah Webster of later dictionary fame, cannot contribute
nearly as much to freedom as “a general distribution of real property among
every class of people.” To avoid the fate of failed ancient republics, the new
American nation had to overcome a “vast inequality of fortunes.”
Of course, not everyone in the new
American republic shared that distaste for grand fortune. But even many of
America’s early rich tended to see extreme inequality as a danger to the new
American project — and tended to support progressive taxation and other moves
that would discourage great disparities in wealth.
“It is confessed on all hands,”
acknowledged the wealthy merchant Gouverneur Morris, “that taxes should be
raised from individuals in proportion to their wealth.”
Should any of this matter to us today?
The generation of 1776, after all, did its thinking more than a couple of
centuries ago. Outside the Fourth of July, how much attention should we pay to
our Founders?
A great deal, contemporary defenders of
privilege seem to think feel.
Conservatives
today claim to represent the spirit of 1776. The most in-your-face of them even
call themselves the “Tea Party” to evoke that spirit.
Attacking grand fortune amounts to
an attack on liberty, these Tea Party types — and their billionaire backers —
pronounce.
Only
“limited government” can save us. And if limiting government means letting
billionaires accumulate as many billions as they can grab, they assert, no harm
done.
The actual leading figures in the
generation of 1776 essentially believed just the opposite. They took, historian
Clement Fatovic notes, “great pride in the relative economic equality they
believed distinguished their country from those in Europe.”
These attitudes should matter to us, his
new book adds. The founders, Fatovic’s “America’s Founding and the Struggle
over Economic Inequality” explains, were undertaking “an experiment in
self-government.”
“The recognition that this experiment
could fail,” the book notes, “made them highly sensitive to the conditions
necessary for its success.”
And no condition, many of those founders
felt, would be more important than avoiding the staggering inequality so then
common in Europe.
The developed world’s most staggering
inequality has now shifted over to the United States. That generation of 1776
would not be pleased.
Sam Pizzigati
edits Too Much, the Institute for Policy Study's online weekly
newsletter on excess and inequality.