History professor Ralph Raico is a dedicated opponent of the court historians’ cant and deception. Great Wars and Great Leaders is a collection of his essays challenging the conventional wisdom, ranging from the beginning of World War I to just after World War II.

As Robert Higgs notes in his introduction, “Raico’s historical essays are not for the faint of heart or for those whose loyalty to the U.S. or British state outweighs their devotion to truth and humanity.” Raico is usually called a “revisionist” historian, but a more fitting term would be “correctionist” because his work corrects false ideas that glorify wars and political leaders who deserve the sharpest condemnation.

The book’s opening essay is about World War I. What most Americans think they know about that war is roughly this: Militaristic Germany was itching for a reason to launch an expansionist war, and the outbreak of fighting in the Balkans gave it an excuse to attack the peaceful democracies France and Britain. Eventually the United States was compelled by German belligerence to enter the war and “make the world safe for democracy.”

The victors get to write the history, and Raico shows that it’s mostly wrong. The Germans and their Austrian allies were not as devilish as they’ve been portrayed, and the Allies were far from angelic. Most important, President Woodrow Wilson was an authoritarian eager to engage in military interventions to advance his fevered notions of “good government.” Raico points out that Wilson had sent U.S. troops into Mexico in 1914. Some of them died—utterly in vain.

Throughout 1915, 1916, and early 1917 Wilson pursued a provocative policy meant to serve British interests. He was glad to trample on international law with respect to the rights of neutrals and declined to pursue diplomatic efforts at restoring peace. Nevertheless, most historians grade Wilson a “near-great” president. Raico shows how undeserved that accolade is.

Winston Churchill’s lustrous reputation also takes a beating in the book. Most people think of Churchill as a rock-ribbed defender of Western traditions. After all, he was a Conservative prime minister who abhorred communism and fascism. Raico makes it plain, however, that he had no real principles when it came to the economic order. At one point in his career Churchill advocated free trade, but he later abandoned that position when it became a political liability. Nor was Churchill an opponent of the advancing British welfare state. He supported the Trades Union Act that gave legal privileges to unions and advocated “a sort of Germanized network of state intervention and regulation” over the labor market. That made him popular with the socialists. Beatrice Webb applauded him for his support of “constructive state action.”

There are hordes of politicians who will get on popular crusades even though they carry the seeds of long-run social ruin. What puts Churchill in a different class is his willingness to sacrifice innocent lives. Raico gives several particulars. Against the advice of his officers Churchill ordered the British fleet to fire on the French Navy, harbored at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria after the Germans had defeated France in 1940. The French commander had said that he would neither surrender his ships to Britain nor permit them to fall into German hands. Nevertheless, the British shelled the ships, killing more than 1,500 sailors. Raico comments that this was a war crime and Germans at Nuremberg were sentenced to death for less. Worse still was the continuing bombing campaign against German cities long after it was evident that Hitler was on the verge of defeat. The bombing of Dresden, a city with no military importance, killed some 30,000 civilians in February 1945.

Another “great leader” Raico demolishes is Harry Truman. Truman is often praised these days for his supposed common sense, but the truth is that he was a statist demagogue whose instincts were to escalate the New Deal’s attacks on liberty and property. Americans are fortunate that most of his efforts were parried by Congress or the courts. The same cannot be said, unfortunately, about his decision to use atomic bombs to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Raico eviscerates the excuse that Truman “had to” use the bomb because the Japanese would otherwise have fought on and killed half a million Americans.

This book defines “iconoclastic.” I strongly recommend it.

But there’s also a danger in viewing everything we read as potential intellectual ammunition: We start to judge people’s work by how well their conclusions line up with our priors rather than how well they’ve made their case. Finding that perfect article that appears to make an argument you’ve long thought was right but could never articulate well, or didn’t know evidence for, is a wonderful feeling, but it’s important not to let that adrenaline rush get in the way of your better judgment. Just because you agree with an author’s conclusions doesn’t mean he or she has done the job well, and it does not help the libertarian cause to make arguments based on erroneous theories, bad data, or incomplete evidence. In fact it is ultimately counterproductive because those who do know the facts will eventually find those errors and will rightly dismiss the conclusions, even if those conclusions might still be right and capable of a better defense.

Revisionist History

This problem is particularly challenging for libertarian revisionist history. To take one example I know well, consider the Great Depression. When libertarians want to argue that Herbert Hoover was a proto-New Dealer, or that FDR’s policies did not really improve matters much, or that World War II did not end the Great Depression, or that laissez faire didn’t cause it, it’s not enough just to make those claims. We had better back up our arguments with unimpeachable statistical and documentary historical evidence. After Keynesian economics won the day, many classical-liberal writers criticized it, but it wasn’t until Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States in the early 1960s that the tide began to turn. That book did the trick because it was meticulously researched and documented, and was able to convince many people that their view of the Great Depression was wrong. We libertarian economists and historians need to bring the same commitment to research excellence to our work.

When libertarians offer revisionist histories of even more controversial topics, such as the Civil War or the origins of the Fed, we have to have that same commitment to doing it right. When we are sloppy with the historical sources, when we distort quotes to serve our priors, or when we ignore sources that challenge our views, we set ourselves up for failure. Our books and articles will eventually be read by our critics, who will properly take us to task for violating the canons of good scholarship. The damage to our reputations, both individually and for libertarians generally, will linger.

Many libertarians are also tempted to dismiss criticisms of scholarship as disguises for disagreement with an author’s conclusions. Others wonder why we should worry about what seems like “nitpicking” if the broader argument is correct. The answer to both is that the details matter. The way to persuade people is to have truth on your side, and if we play fast and loose with arguments and evidence, those we are trying to persuade will not trust anything we have to say.

Cultivating Critical Thinkers

I spent last weekend talking about teaching with a group of libertarian faculty and grad students. A recurring issue was how “out of the closet” we should be about our libertarianism in the classroom. The experienced faculty said it’s okay to be honest about what one believes, but the first responsibility is to cultivate students who are good critical thinkers and who have a commitment to finding truth. If we believe libertarian ideas are true, then students who care about truth and who are good critical thinkers will find them eventually. We don’t need to “force” them on our students. The same goes for what we write.

So how can you as readers know what’s good and what’s not? One answer is to read the other side. Read books critical of libertarian views and see if libertarian authors seem to have it right. Read reviews of libertarian books both by other libertarians and by nonlibertarians. See what flaws they find, especially when fellow libertarians find them. See what sources they point to. And most of all, don’t think that one author has all the answers or that libertarianism is a finished system of truths. We don’t have all the answers, which is why being committed first and foremost to finding truth is so important. Anything else is a recipe for failure.

In this landmark book, Beard, a professor of history at Columbia University, argued that the Constitution was “an economic document drawn with superb skill by men whose property interests were immediately at stake.” The Founders, then, rather than being patriots, wise lawmakers, or thoughtful students of government, were primarily in the Constitution-writing business to protect their “property interests.”

Conflicts of Interest

The Founders’ economic motives, according to Beard, were straightforward—they were owed money from their support of the Revolution, and those “public securities” (receipts for loans made to support American independence) were not being repaid under the weak Articles of Confederation. A stronger governing document was needed to ease the transfer of tax dollars from ordinary citizens into the pockets of the more affluent Founders.

Thus, according to Beard, the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787 was promoted by “a small and active group of men immediately interested through their personal possessions in the outcome of their labors. . . . The propertyless masses were . . . excluded at the outset from participation. . . .”

Beard, who was among the first generation of professionally trained historians, gathered evidence on the Founders: “Many leaders in the movement for ratification were large [public] security holders,” he argued. Those who opposed the Constitution owned fewer public securities.

Each state had to vote on ratifying the Constitution, and Beard offered evidence that “the leaders who supported the Constitution in the ratifying conventions represented the same economic groups as the members of the Philadelphia convention.” The Founders, Beard conceded, did not write the Constitution merely to make money, but nonetheless, “The Constitution was essentially an economic document.”

Beard’s thesis, seemingly well researched, was presented in a tentative way, but it soon swept the historical profession and became gospel in college classrooms by the 1920s. The Constitution, professors suggested to their students, was not a document worthy of special respect. It was a product of self-interest that should be interpreted loosely and changed as the Progressives saw fit.

The constitutional separation of powers, for example, according to Woodrow Wilson—a friend of Beard’s and a fellow Ph.D. in history—was a “grievous mistake” by the Founders. More centralization of power was needed—especially in the executive branch—to change society through needed reforms, such as the progressive income tax.

Beard made his reputation with his book and went on to an illustrious career: He authored or coauthored 49 books that had sold more than 11 million copies by 1952.

Questionable Scholarship

During the 1950s, historian Forrest McDonald did a more thorough study of the Founders and discovered what can most generously be described as errors in research and, less generously, as fraudulent research. McDonald traveled to archives throughout the original 13 states and meticulously compiled data on thousands of men involved in the debate over the Constitution. After systematically studying the lives of the Founders and the state convention delegates, McDonald wrote We the People, which debunked Beard completely. “No correlation” exists, McDonald discovered, “between their economic interests and their votes on issues in general or on key economic issues.” In fact, McDonald emphasized that in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and New York “most [public] security holders opposed ratification.”

How could Beard have erred so badly? In part Beard missed the mark because he was trying to hit something else—a Progressive agenda for reform, the excuse to transfer wealth from the haves to the have-nots. If the Founders were merely protecting their economic interests, Beard and his progressive friends were justified in supporting the redistribution of wealth.

How can we be sure that Beard was blinded by his ideology? One indication is that he seems to have willfully distorted his evidence to suggest that certain signers of the Constitution owned more public securities (and other forms of wealth) than they actually did. For example, Daniel Jenifer of Maryland, who signed the Constitution in Philadelphia, held no public securities—a point against Beard’s view that the signers were self-interested. But Beard classified Jenifer among the large security holders because his son Daniel Jenifer, Jr., held several thousand dollars’ worth of them.

But alas, as McDonald shows, “Jenifer had no children—at least no legitimate ones—for in both of the sources Beard used to gather data on Jenifer, it is expressly stated that Jenifer was a bachelor.” Beard also classified Gunning Bedford, Jr., a delegate from Delaware, as a security holder, but, as Beard admits, there were two Gunning Bedfords in Delaware, and the one who didn’t sign the Constitution was the one who owned the public securities. Furthermore, Beard places delegates Nicholas Gilman, William Samuel Johnson, Charles Pinckney, and others as holders of public securities, but they did not acquire these securities until long after they signed the Constitution.

Some of Beard’s mistakes are more subtle. He classifies delegate William Few as a security holder because Few funded a “certificate of 1779” with a “nominal” value of $2,170. True, but what Beard neglects to say is that Few’s “nominal” value was scaled down to a mere $114.80, a sum hardly worth motivating Few to sign the Constitution to redeem.

No doubt all the Founders were concerned about their own finances as well as those of the nation. But in writing the Constitution, they were above all trying to apply principles of natural rights and limited government to create a durable nation that would be a bastion of freedom in an unfree world. James Madison and other Founders diligently studied ancient and modern republics to learn from their mistakes what safeguards to employ to protect liberty while allowing elected politicians enough authority to effectively lead the nation.

The Sacrifices Made

What Beard omits from his history is the wisdom and dedication of the Founders in overcoming narrow self-interest to produce a masterful guiding document for the country. The actions of Robert Morris of Pennsylvania and Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, for example, are remarkable. Both men signed the Constitution and supported it vigorously even though they ultimately lost money doing so.

Both men had committed to buy land with public securities—which were trading at only about 15 percent of par value before the Constitution was ratified. When the Constitution was ratified and the public securities were redeemed, both Morris and Gorham had to buy the securities at par value, so they both lost fortunes. Morris, in fact, went from being the wealthiest merchant in the United States in 1787 to being tossed into debtors’ prison in the 1790s. Contrary to Beard, Morris had voted against his own economic self-interest, and for his country’s financial integrity.