Revisionist History vs. Federal Power: A Losing Academic Battle (So Far)
I see the expansion of federal power as a ratchet. Once it clicks tighter, it does not go back.
Legislation passed is almost never repealed. A new federal bureaucracy never goes away. Most importantly, federal spending does not decline.
Presidents who oversee no major expansion of federal power are dismissed by academic historians as inconsequential or else failures. Van Buren and Cleveland were almost libertarians. They are rarely mentioned in 1,000-page American history textbooks. Van Buren may get a few lines as the overseer of the forced removal of Georgia's Indians to Oklahoma: the Trail of Tears. Cleveland is mentioned as a do-nothing President in a long recession, and the only President to have two terms separated by another President. Calvin Coolidge is dismissed as "silent Cal," a pro-business, do-nothing President. James Buchanan is rated as either the worst President or second-worst after Grant. Why? Because he kept the nation together, whereas the sainted Lincoln's election led to secession.
The utter failure of the conservative movement can be seen in the fact that there is no body of careful scholarship that rejects the dual legacies of Lincoln and FDR as unwarranted violations of federal power. The textbooks assigned to the children of conservatives and Bible-affirming Christians are written by New Deal cheerleaders. Lincoln is presented as part of a steady movement of centralizing power, beginning with Alexander Hamilton, extending through Henry Clay, ratcheting upward with Clay's self-conscious disciple Lincoln, ratcheting again with Teddy Roosevelt, then Wilson, and culminating with FDR.
CONNECTING THE DOTS RETROACTIVELY
Conservatives gag on the suggestion that all this did not begin with Hamilton. It began with the man who made Hamilton a colonel after Hamilton joined the Freemasons: General Washington. He is more sainted than Lincoln. He is universally sainted . . . except for me. It extended to James Madison, the man who engineered a coup -- a coup that he knew could be successful only if Washington joined it, which Washington refused to do until his former general, Henry Knox, deceived him with false information about the supposed revolutionary intentions of Daniel Shays' tax revolt. I have discussed this in an article that I wrote for Lew Rockwell: "John Hancock's Big Toe. "
Was the Constitutional Convention a coup? Of course. No one was allowed into the meetings. The members were sworn to secrecy, which is why Luther Martin's notes and Madison's notes were not published until after Madison's death in 1836. They all agreed not to publish notes while any of them was still alive. This was why the press was excluded. This is why the instructions of several colonial legislatures to revise but not replace the Articles of Confederation were violated from the day the Convention began. This is why the Articles' requirement of unanimity was replaced by a three-quarters vote, and not voted on in elected colonial legislatures, but in independently organized state conventions. I present this revisionist case in my book, Conspiracy in Philadelphia. You can download it for free here.
Yet even that is too mild. The story should proceed (recede?) to John Hancock and Samuel Adams, a failed tax collector, who together began a revolt against a tax cut. Yes, the famous tea party was a revolt against a major tax cut. The British had cut taxes on Indian tea imported by the British East India Company. This dramatically reduced the profit margins on smuggled tea from the Dutch East Indies. Hancock was the richest smuggler in North America. He worked with Paul Revere to organize his fellow Freemasons who met in the Green Dragon Tavern to dress up as Indians and throw privately owned tea off two privately owned colonial ships in Boston harbor.
I was not told this in my high school history textbook, written by Progressive historian David Saville Muzzey, who dominated the textbook market from 1911 to 1966. I was not taught it in college or grad school, yet my specialty in grad school was colonial American history. I learned about it only by reading monographs that were not assigned.
The good news is that Wikipedia now tells the truth. Reading of the Tea Act of 1773, the entry says this.
This act restored the East India Company's full refund on the duty for importing tea into Britain, and also permitted the company, for the first time, to export tea to the colonies on its own account. This would allow the company to reduce costs by eliminating the middlemen who bought the tea at wholesale auctions in London. Instead of selling to middlemen, the company now appointed colonial merchants to receive the tea on consignment; the consignees would in turn sell the tea for a commission. In July 1773, tea consignees were selected in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston. . . .Even with the Townshend duty in effect, the Tea Act would allow the East India Company to sell tea more cheaply than before, undercutting the prices offered by smugglers, but also undercutting colonial tea importers, who paid the tax and received no refund. In 1772, legally imported Bohea, the most common variety of tea, sold for about 3 shillings (3s) per pound. After the Tea Act, colonial consignees would be able to sell it for 2 shillings per pound (2s), just under the smugglers' price of 2 shillings and 1 penny (2s 1d).
There was zero resistance in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. The resistance was all in Boston. Why? Hancock and his supporters, combined with Sam Adams and his supporters. By 1773, Hancock and Adams were allies.
After the American Revolution, taxes at least tripled. The tax rate had been about 1% in 1775. They never returned to what they were in 1774.
How far back should we go? Inquiring minds want to know. (Actually, they don't, which is the heart of the problem for historians in general and revisionist historians especially.)
THE TASK AT HAND
The problem with revisionist history is that it moves back from the big spenders of the present era, who have lots of detractors, to the big spenders of a preceding era, who were in principle just as bad as today's big spenders. They just had less federal money to spend on boondoggles and systematic invasions of privacy. Saint by statist saint, revisionist historians push the saints off their high-tax pedestals.
Yet the closer they get to the so-called Founding Fathers, the less willing they are to push. The further back in time historians go, the more that historiography becomes hagiography. Readers have accepted the story of the Founding Saints. They would have to re-think too much if these saints were knocked off their pedestals. So, the readers form a praetorian guard around the mausoleums of the earliest plaster saints of big spending. The market for revisionist history fades, the further back in time we go.
Then today's era dies off. The next generation is content with the level of federal spending. So, today we find that Newt Gingrich is a big fan of FDR. So was Ronald Reagan.
It is not just the ratchet of federal spending that rises. With each rise comes a new praetorian guard around the mausoleums of a President who in his day was opposed by a minority phalanx of already deeply compromised "limited government" critics, who had fully bought into the spending policies of the big spender Presidents a generation earlier. Sometimes, it does not take a generation. It takes only four years. From 1933 to December 7, 1941, the loudest critics of FDR were big fans of Herbert Hoover, who had been a big spender, deficit producer, and constant meddler when compared to Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge died on January 3, 1933, two months before FDR's inauguration. There was no outcry of grief, no sense of the world they had lost. But the United States had lost it, step by step.
It did not start with FDR. It did not start with Lincoln.
We need a revisionist textbook that traces this loss all the way back. Then we will need another that traces it back even further.
The markets for such textbooks will be initially small. After the great default, when Washington's checks bounce, demand will grow. Millions of Americans will ask no one in particular: "How did this happen?" That question deserves an answer based on detailed historical research. Someone age 25 should start researching the answer. This person must be a true entrepreneur. He must plan for future demand that is not visible to many.
Maybe you are the one to do it. If not, you may know someone who might be. Please forward this essay to that person.