The Atlantic
Criticizing the Founders is in vogue these days, but what they did was extraordinary.
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The Atlantic
In 1788, We the People of the United States ordained a Constitution to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” It was the year that changed everything. Yet for the past century, posterity has profoundly misunderstood what happened then who did what, why they did it, and how, and also what they failed to do that needed doing.
Much of the confusion began in 1913, when the American historian Charles Beard published his muckraking blockbuster,
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, the 20th century’s most influential work of constitutional scholarship. Beard portrayed the Constitution’s leading drafters as moneymen lining their own pockets and those of their elite confreres. In Beard’s account, George Washington and company were Gilded Age robber barons avant la lettre, fat cats rigging the rule