Progressive Constitutional Thought

• Author: John Patrick Diggins
• Pages: 2046-2048

Page 2046

During the Progressive era, roughly from 1900 to 1920, the Constitution and the SUPREME COURT came in for considerable criticism on the part of historians, political theorists, statesmen, intellectuals, and journalists. The criticisms involved five issues: the origins of the Constitution's authority; claims that the Constitution, and the system of government it supported, were antiquated and needed to be modified in light of developments in modern science; protests that the Supreme Court functioned as an instrument of business interests; demands that the Constitution be reinterpreted to allow for federal regulation of industry; and similar demands that it become the agency of social reform.

Prior to the Progressive era the Constitution's authority rested on the assumption that it was a neutral document capable of rendering objective judgments based on either transcendent religious principles or secular doctrines like natural law. The first challenge to that assumption came from J. ALLEN SMITH'S The Spirit of American Government

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(1907), in which the Constitution was alleged to be a "reactionary" document designed to thwart the democratic principles of the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE by means of CHECKS AND BALANCES and JUDICIAL REVIEW of legislative actions of popular majorities. But the most thorough critique of the Constitution's presumed disinterested authority fell like a blockbuster with the publication of CHARLES A. BEARD'S An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913). Here readers discovered that the movement toward RATIFICATION OF THE CONSTITUTION in 1787?1789 was led by merchants, manufacturers, creditors, and land speculators whose primary concern was to protect their own interests from what JAMES MADISON called "over-bearing factions." THE FEDERALIST'S authors, Beard was aware, hardly concealed the fact that they regarded protection of property as the essence of liberty. But Beard's exposure of the economic motives of the Framers did much to demystify the moral character of the Constitution by disclosing the "interests" behind it.

While the historian Beard tried to unmask the sacred image of the Constitution, political theorists tried to reestablish it on a more scientific foundation. In The Process of Government (1908) Arthur Bentley suggested that the scholar must penetrate beyond the formal structure of the Constitution to appreciate the forces and pressures that act upon it...