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.

The Declaration of Independence reflected a generation of thinking on the subject of natural rights—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Constitution later separated the powers of government to protect life, liberty, and property from future encroachments by potential tyrants.

Woodrow Wilson had only limited use for the Founders and the Declaration. “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence,” Wilson urged, “do not read the preface.” Government did not exist merely to protect rights. Instead, Wilson argued that the Declaration “expressly leaves to each generation of men the determination of what they will do with their lives. . . . In brief, political liberty is the right of those who are governed to adjust the government to their own needs and interests.” “We are not,” Wilson insisted, “bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”

The limited government enshrined in both the Declaration and the Constitution may have been an advance for the Founders, Wilson conceded, but society had evolved since then. The modern state of the early 1900s was “beneficent” and “indispensable.” Separation of powers hindered modern governments from promoting progress. “[T]he only fruit of dividing power,” Wilson asserted, “was to make it irresponsible.”

A better “constitutional government,” Wilson urged, was one “whose powers have been adapted to the interests of its people.” A strong executive was needed, he believed, to translate the interests of the people into public policy. The president was the opinion leader, the “spokesman for the real sentiment and purpose of the country.” And what the country needed was “a man who will be and who will seem to the country in some sort of an embodiment of the character and purpose it wishes its government to have—a man who understood his own day and the needs of his country.”

In the White House, Wilson intended to be a strong president working with a “living Constitution.” He promoted the expanding of “beneficent” government into new areas. In his second year as president he concluded that shipping rates were too high, and he blessed his secretary of treasury’s plan to regulate overseas shipping rates and the companies doing the shipping. Later he promoted a plan to make loans to farmers at federally subsidized rates. Then he pushed through Congress a bill fixing an eight-hour day for railroad workers.

Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution gives no power to the federal government to regulate the prices of trade, the hours of work, or to make special loans to farmers or any other group. But Wilson said he was operating with a “living Constitution” and that increased government in these cases reflected appropriately the greater will of the people. Likewise, when Wilson helped centralize banking with the Federal Reserve system and when he further restricted trade by promoting the Clayton Antitrust Act, he believed that this work for the general good outweighed any loyalties to the rigid construction set up by the Founders in the original Constitution.

Not all Americans agreed with Wilson ’s evolving Constitution. The Adamson Act, which required the eight-hour day for railroad workers, was challenged and went to the Supreme Court. It was sustained by a 5–4 majority, but Justice William Day was appalled at the constitutional violations in the bill. “Such legislation, it seems to me,” Day said, “amounts to the taking of the property of one and giving it to another in violation of the spirit of fair play and equal right which the Constitution intended to secure in the due process clause to all coming within its protection.”

Such growth of government came with a cost, but Wilson was ready with the progressive income tax to pay for his new programs. World War I clearly influenced Wilson’s use of the tax and his centralization of power—he promoted an increase in the top tax rate from 7 to 15 percent in 1916; then, during the war, Wilson secured an increase to a 77 percent marginal rate on the country’s largest incomes.

Where Wilson supported an evolving Constitution that gave him authority to increase the power of government and centralize power, President Calvin Coolidge, who was on the ticket that succeeded Wilson, believed that the Declaration and the Constitution should be accepted as the Founders wrote them.

In July 1926, on the sesquicentennial of the signing of the Declaration, Coolidge gave a speech reaffirming the need for limited government. “It is not so much then for the purpose of undertaking to proclaim new theories and principles that this annual celebration is maintained, but rather to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound.”

Coolidge added that “there is a finality” about the Declaration. “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary.”

Coolidge’s attitude as president reflected his belief in the ideas of the Declaration. He was not always consistent—for example, he signed the Fordney-McCumber Tariff in 1922, which slapped high and uneven taxes on some needed imports. But his efforts were largely in the direction of reducing the size of government to increase liberty. For example, Coolidge cut the size of government and was the last president to have budget surpluses every year of his presidency. Also, when the Harding-Coolidge administration came into office in 1921, the tax rate on top incomes was 73 percent; when Coolidge left the presidency eight years later it was 25 percent. The rates on the lowest incomes were also slashed.

Attacked Special Interests

Furthermore, Coolidge often attacked special interests. He vetoed a bill to give a special cash bonus to veterans; and, through President Harding, he was part of the administration that shut down a government-operated steel plant set up by Wilson, which had lost money each year of its operation.

Not once but twice Coolidge courageously vetoed the McNary-Haugen farm bill, which was popular with farmers because it promised federal price supports for them. “I do not believe,” Coolidge wrote, “that upon serious consideration the farmers of America would tolerate the precedent of a body of men chosen solely by one industry who, acting in the name of the government, shall arrange for contracts which determine prices, secure the buying and selling of commodities, the levying of taxes on that industry, and pay losses on foreign dumping of any surplus.”

When presidents are faithful to America ’s founding documents, limited government has a chance to flourish. But when presidents emote over a “living” Declaration and Constitution, then the growth of government is upon us.

There are few more dangerous errors in political thinking than to equate democracy with liberty. Unfortunately, this is one of the most widespread errors in America —and a key reason why there are few leashes left on government power. As Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek observed in a 1976 speech, “The magic word democracy has become so all-powerful that all the inherited limitations on government power are breaking down before it. . . . It is unlimited democracy, not just democracy, which is the problem today.”¹

People have long been encouraged to confuse self-government of their own lives with “self-government” via majority rule over everyone. Because abusive rule by foreigners or a king personified oppression, many presumed that rule by people of one’s own nationality meant freedom. Boston pastor Benjamin Church proclaimed in 1773 that liberty was “the happiness of living under laws of our own making. Therefore, the liberty of the people is exactly proportioned to the share the body of the people have in the legislature.”² However, the rampages of state and local majorities during and after the American Revolution debunked this naïve faith in majorities.

Americans quickly recognized that liberty meant lack of coercion—especially lack of government coercion. “The Restraint of Government is the True Liberty and Freedom of the People” was a popular motto of the late 1700s.³ John Phillip Reid, in his seminal work, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, observed that liberty in the eighteenth century was “largely thought of as freedom from arbitrary government. . . . The less a law restrained the citizen, and the more it restrained government, the better the law.”⁴ This concept of freedom continued into the early part of the twentieth century. 

But as time passed, enthusiasm for government power returned and different concepts of freedom arose to again vindicate awarding unlimited power to the majority. Progressive Herbert Croly, one of President Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite writers, declared in 1909, “Individual freedom is important, but more important still is the freedom of a whole people to dispose of its own destiny.”⁵ However, in practice, this means the “freedom of the whole people” to dispose of individuals’ rights, property, and lives. 

This confusion has prospered in part because, throughout Western history, tyrants and tyrant apologists have sought to browbeat citizens into obedience by telling them that they are only obeying themselves. The eighteenth-century French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau used this bait and switch to sanctify democracy. Rousseau wrote: “Each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody. . . . Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”⁶ The general will is “infallible,” and “to express the general will is to express each man’s real will.” Rousseau taught that people need not fear a government animated by the general will because each citizen would be “obeying only myself.”⁷ And because the people’s will would actuate government, the classical warnings on the danger of government power became null and void. The horrors of the French Revolution cast Rousseau’s doctrines into temporary disrepute, but his intellectual contortions permeated subsequent thinking on democracy and government.

Some U.S. presidents who have been most enthusiastic on seizing power have exonerated themselves by claiming that “the people did it.” FDR declared in 1938, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us,”⁸ and Bill Clinton declared in 1996 that “The Government is just the people, acting together. . . .”⁹ In his 1989 farewell address, Ronald Reagan asserted, “ ‘We the People’ tell the government what to do, it doesn’t tell us. ‘We the people’ are the driver—the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast.”¹⁰ But the American people did not choose to drive into Beirut and get hundreds of Marines blown up, or choose to run up the largest budget deficits in American history, or provide thousands of antitank weapons to Ayatollah Khomeni, or have a slew of top political appointees either lie or get caught in conflicts of interest or other abuses of power or ethical quandaries between 1981 and 1988.

Invoking “the government is the people” is one of the easiest ways for a politician to shirk responsibility for his actions. This doctrine makes sense only if one assumes that government’s victims are subconscious masochists and government is only fulfilling their secret wishes when it messes up their lives.

The notion that democracy automatically produces liberty hinges on the delusion that “people are obeying themselves.” But, as Freeman editor Sheldon Richman commented, “When you rushed to finish your income tax return at the last minute on April 15, were you in fear of yourself and your fellow Americans or the IRS?”¹¹ People who exceed the speed limit are not “self-ticketed.” People who fail to recycle their beer bottles are not self-fined, as if the recycling police were a mere apparition of a guilty conscience.

Is a citizen governing herself when she is arrested for possessing a handgun in her own home for self-defense in a crime-ridden District of Columbia neighborhood where police long since ceased providing minimum protection? Is a 20-year-old citizen governing himself when he is arrested in his own home by police for drinking a beer? The fact that a majority—or, more likely, a majority of the minority who bothered to vote—may have sanctioned such laws and government powers has nothing to do with the self-government by each citizen of his own life. 

Yet by assuring people that they are the government, this makes all the coercion, all the expropriation, all the intrusive searches, all the prison sentences for victimless crimes irrelevant. At least for the theoreticians and apologists of democracy.

Praising Democracy to Unleash Government

The more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans’ rights. Abraham Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth-century presidents—and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.¹² He swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly closed hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

President Woodrow Wilson pioneered the democracy-as-salvation bosh. Yet his administration had the worst civil rights record since the Civil War—imposing Jim Crow restrictions on federal employees that resulted in the mass firing of black civil servants. After taking the nation into World War I, Wilson rammed a Sedition Act through Congress that empowered the feds to imprison anyone who muttered a kind word for the Kaiser.¹³ Wilson pushed conscription through Congress—as if his goal of having “a seat at the table” at the postwar peace conferences entitled him to dispose of a hundred thousand American lives. Wilson ’s constant invocation of democracy shielded him against a popular backlash, at least until the fraud of the peace settlement became widely recognized.

Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency was the clearest turning point in the American understanding of freedom. In a 1937 speech on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, FDR declared that “even some of our own people may wonder whether democracy can match dictatorship in giving this generation the things it wants from government.” FDR’s comment was part of his attack on those who opposed his seizure of power over property, wages, and contracts. Earlier that year, in his second inaugural address, he bragged, “In these last four years, we have made the exercise of all power more democratic; for we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government.” When the Supreme Court found many of Roosevelt ’s power grabs unconstitutional, he announced plans to wreck the power of the Court by stacking it with new appointees—showing his contempt for any limits on his power. “FDR freedom” meant presidential supremacy—and nothing else. 

In his 1941 State of the Union address, FDR announced the “four freedoms”—“freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world”; “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world”; “freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world;” and “freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.” FDR’s revised freedoms ignored most of all the specific limitations on government power contained in the Bill of Rights. Now, instead of a liberty for each to live his own life and go his own way, Roosevelt offered freedom from fear and freedom from want—“freedoms” that require omnipresent government surveillance and perpetual government intervention. Roosevelt perennially invoked freedom as a pretext to increase government power. His promises of freedom for the entire world distracted attention from how his administration was subjugating Americans. Partly because Americans in the 1930s and early 1940s were less politically astute than those of the Founding era, FDR’s bait and switch worked like a charm—and was canonized into American folklore by Norman Rockwell and others.

Complacent about Liberty

Freedom became increasingly bastardized in the decades after FDR. President Nixon, like most of his predecessors, encouraged Americans to be complacent about their liberty. In 1973, in his second inaugural address, he declared: “Let us be proud that our system has produced and provided more freedom and more abundance, more widely shared, than any other system in the history of the world.” Americans later learned that, at the time of Nixon’s statement, the FBI was involved in a massive campaign to suppress opposition to the government and to the Vietnam War, and Nixon himself was involved in obstructing the investigation of the Watergate break-in and related crimes. But Nixon may not have seen such actions as a violation of liberty because, as he explained to interviewer David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.” Frost, somewhat dumbfounded, replied, “By definition?” Nixon answered, “Exactly. Exactly.”¹⁴ 

President Clinton openly scapegoated freedom for many problems caused by government (such as welfare programs). In a 1994 interview with MTV he declared, “When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly. . . . What’s happened in America today is, too many people live in areas where there’s no family structure, no community structure, and no work structure. And so there’s a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there’s too much personal freedom. When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.”¹⁵ 

But the Bill of Rights did not give freedom to Americans; instead, it was a solemn pledge by the government that it recognized and would not violate the pre-existing rights of individuals. The Bill of Rights was not “radical” according to the beliefs of Americans of that era; it codified rights both long recognized in English common law and purchased in blood during the Revolution. The Founding Fathers had difficulty getting the Constitution approved in many states not because it was “radical” in giving people rights—but because it was perceived as concentrating too much power to violate rights within the federal government. Yet by painting freedom as a gift of the government, Clinton distracted people from recognizing the threat that any government—democratic or otherwise—poses to their rights.

President George W. Bush uses freedom and democracy interchangeably, as if they were two sides of the same wooden nickel. Bush explained to a Dutch journalist in May 2005: “ Holland is a free country. It’s a country where the people get to decide the policy. The Government just reflects the will of the people. That’s what democracies are all about.”¹⁶ Later that day he was questioned by another Dutch journalist:

Q. How do you define freedom?

The President. Freedom, democracy? 

Q. Freedom as such.

The President. Well, I view freedom as where government doesn’t dictate. Government is responsive to the needs of people. . . . That’s what freedom—government is of the people. We say ‘‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.” And a free society is one if the people don’t like what is going on, they can get new leaders. . . . That’s free society, society responsive to people.¹⁷

And as long as government claims to respond to the people, the people are free, no matter how much the government abuses them.

Bush Freedom hinges on government as the savior of freedom. Debates over the Patriot Act provided further opportunity for degrading the American vocabulary. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft titled the August 2003 launch speech of his national Patriot Act promotion tour “Securing Our Liberty: How America Is Winning the War on Terror.” Earlier in 2003 Ashcroft characterized Justice Department antiterrorist deliberations this way: “Every day we are asking each other, what can we do to be more successful in securing the freedoms of America and sustaining the liberty, the tolerance, the human dignity that America represents.”¹⁸

Ashcroft’s successor, Alberto Gonzales, used the same rhetoric to sanctify the Patriot Act: “Congress did a good job in striking the appropriate balance between protecting our country and securing our liberties.”¹⁹ The Patriot Act authorized confiscations of travelers’ money (in violation of a Supreme Court ruling), the use of new surveillance software that could vacuum up millions of people’s e-mails without a search warrant, nationwide “roving wiretaps,” and seizing library, bookstore, and other business and financial records based solely on subpoenas issued by FBI field offices on the flimsiest of pretexts.²⁰ After the Patriot Act was signed, there was a hundredfold increase in the number of emergency spying warrants issued solely on the Attorney General’s command—and later rubber-stamped by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.²¹ But all the violations of Americans’ rights and liberties by federal agents are irrelevant because the proclaimed intent of the Patriot Act is to “secure liberty.” There is no freedom without security, and no security without absolute power.

Intellectuals Join In

It is not only politicians who seek to confuse people about the reality of liberty. Intellectuals who should know better join in the circus shell game. Former federal judge and Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1996 called for “a constitutional amendment making any federal or state court decision subject to being overruled by a majority vote of each House of Congress.” Bork appealed to “our most precious freedom, the freedom to govern ourselves democratically.”²² According to this view, the greatest danger to freedom is having frustrated legislators.

What are the mechanics by which majority-mandated shackles liberate the individual? How does a shackle supported by 51 percent of the populace affect an individual differently from one endorsed by a mere 49 percent? Is the secret to democracy some law of inverse political gravity—so that the more people who support imposing a shackle, the less it weighs? Are citizens obliged to pretend that any restriction favored by the majority is not a restraint but instead a badge of freedom? Shackles are shackles are shackles, regardless of what rhetorical holy water they are blessed with.

People are taught that, thanks to democracy, coercion is no longer dangerous because people get to vote on who coerces them. Because people are permitted a role in choosing who will be in charge of the penal code, they are free. Being permitted to vote for politicians who enact unjust, oppressive new laws magically converts the stripes on prison shirts into emblems of freedom. But it takes more than voting to make coercion benign.

The fiction of majority rule has become a license to impose nearly unlimited controls on the majority and everybody else. The doctrine of “majority rule equals freedom” is custom-made to turn mobs of voters into spoiled children with a divine right to plunder the candy store. The only way to equate submission to majority-sanctioned decrees with individual freedom is to assume that individuals have no right to live in any way that displeases the majority. 

The more confused people’s thinking becomes, the easier it is for rulers to invoke democracy to destroy freedom. The issue is not simply Lincoln ’s, Roosevelt’s, Clinton’s or Bush’s absurd statements on freedom but a cultural–intellectual smog in which politicians have unlimited leeway to redefine freedom. If politicians can redefine freedom at their whim, then they can raze limits on their own power.

It is better that government be representative than nonrepresentative. But it is more important that governments respect people’s rights than fulfill some people’s wishes to oppress other people. The rules that a person must obey are more important than the identity of the nominal rulers. Herbert Spencer wrote in 1857, “The liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or not, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.”²³ The existence of democracy does not change the meaning of individual liberty. A person is free or not free, regardless of how many people approve his fetters.

The Founding Fathers fought for a government that would respect their rights, not for a government that would allow them to forcibly micromanage the lives of their fellow citizens. The only way to claim that democracy automatically protects liberty is to say that the only freedom that matters is “freedom for the government to rule in the name of the people.”

Reconciling Democracy with Liberty

The scope of majority rule should be limited to those issues and areas in which common standards must prevail to preserve public peace. Democracy is a relatively good method for reaching agreement on a system of roads, but is a lousy method for dictating where each citizen must go. Democracy can be a good method for reaching agreement on standards of weights and measurements used in commerce, but is a poor method for dictating wages and prices. Democracy should be a system of government based on common agreement on issues that must be agreed upon, and tolerance—however grudging—on all other differences. 

“Whenever majority rule is unnecessarily substituted for individual choice, democracy is in conflict with individual freedom,” wrote Italian professor Bruno Leoni in his 1961 classic, Freedom and the Law.²⁴ Majority rule is a means not an end. There is nothing superior in majorities running (or thinking they run) a government compared to an individual running his own life. Collective rule will always be inferior to the self-rule of a citizen in his own life. 

The fact that democratic governments violate liberty does not prove that democracy is uniquely or inherently evil. This is simply what governments do. In the same way that a political candidate’s lies don’t create a presumption that his opponent is honest, the fact that democracies routinely violate rights and liberties creates no presumption that other forms of government would not be worse.

1. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Essence of Hayek (Palo Alto, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), p. 352. 
2. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic , 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 24.
3. John Phillip Reid, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 65. 
4. Ibid., pp. 65, 114.
5. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1993 [1909]), p. 442.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (New York: Dutton, 1950), p. 14. 
7. Ibid., p. 87. 
8. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 489 (emphasis added). 
9. “Remarks to Business Leaders in Stamford , Connecticut ,” Public Papers of the Presidents, October 7, 1996, p. 1999.
10. “Farewell Address to the Nation,” Public Papers of the Presidents, January 11, 1989, p. 53.
11. Sheldon Richman, “Government Is Not ‘Us’,” Future of Freedom Foundation, June 2, 2004.
12. See Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), and Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln (New York: Random House, 2003).
13. Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory ( New York : Basic Books, 2003), p. 382.
14. “Nixon’s Views on Presidential Power: Excerpts from an Interview with David Frost,” www.landmarkcases.org/nixon/_nixonview.html.
15. “Remarks by the President in MTV’s ‘Enough is Enough’ Forum on Crime,” Office of the Press Secretary, White House, April 19, 1994.
16. “Interview with Dutch TV NOS,” Public Papers of the Presidents, May 5, 2005.
17. “Interview with Foreign Print Journalists,” in ibid.
18. Gene R. Nichol, “Ashcroft Wants Even More,” Raleigh News and Observer, February 20, 2003.
19. “Conversation with U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; Preview of President Bush’s Speech—Part 1,” Charlie Rose Show Transcripts, June 27, 2005.
20. Ibid., pp. 145–46, 137–40.
21. Ibid., p. 144.
22. Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 115, 117.
23. Gary Doherty and Tim Gray, “Herbert Spencer and the Relations Between Economic and Political Liberty ,” History of Political Thought, Autumn 1993, p. 475.
24. Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, 1991 [1961]), p. 131.

The war that did the most to transform the world for the worse was formally settled 80 years ago. Not World War II, which employed greater destructiveness, exhibited greater cruelty, and slaughtered greater numbers of people. But World War I, which birthed World War II, along with the greatest of the totalitarian delusions—communism, fascism, and Nazism. Yet the Great War, as it was originally called, is largely forgotten in America.

Today the United States celebrates Veterans Day on November 11, which replaced the original Armistice Day. But when Americans think of veterans they think of Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. Not so in Europe. There World War I continues to loom large.

As it should. The Triple Entente, with which America was allied, had won when the guns fell silent on November 11, 1918. But as the Versailles peace conference, which opened in January 1919, proceeded throughout the spring, the Western powers managed to lose the peace. Tens of millions in the next generation would pay for their mistakes.

And the Europeans continue to fight leftover issues of the war. For instance, last November French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin suggested rehabilitating army mutineers who had been executed during a massive soldiers’ revolt in 1917. President Jacques Chirac sharply rejected Jospin’s idea, however, citing the negative reaction from surviving veterans. Yet at the same time the British government allowed relatives of soldiers executed for cowardice and desertion during World War I to hold a ceremony at the Cenotaph, Whitehall’s monument to the war dead.

To the extent that Americans know anything about the war, they probably think of supposed idealist Woodrow Wilson leading the fight to make the world “safe for democracy.” This was pure cant. Instead, Wilson was dedicated to reforming the entire world and would have a chance to do so only if he headed a belligerent power. His high-flown rhetoric disguised the fact that he had allied America with one militaristic bloc against the other.

While Germany helped bring on the war by isolating itself and adopting a hair-trigger mobilization plan, it was not bent on war. German diplomacy after Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was maladroit and stupid, not malicious.

France, in contrast, was aggressively revisionist. It wanted to recover the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost in 1871 in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (which had been started by France). This required not just war between France and Germany, but a European-wide conflict, since France alone could not defeat Germany.

Austria-Hungary, Germany’s ally, was also a status quo power, desperately seeking to avoid internal collapse. In contrast, Italy, which eventually joined the Entente, desired Austro-Hungarian territory; Russia hoped to gain influence in the Balkans at the expense of Vienna.

Most important, the blood-stained Serbian regime, built on the brutal murder of the king and queen of the previous dynasty in 1903, wanted to break apart Austria-Hungary in order to build a greater Serbia. In fact, it was the Serbian-supported assassination of Austria-Hungary’s heir apparent that lit the fuse of the war. The contending alliance systems acted as transmission belts of war for all of the major European powers.

After the deaths of some ten million people, all the contending nations’ goals looked downright frivolous. Washington’s formal justification for war was its desire to protect the right of Americans to travel on armed British merchantmen carrying munitions through a war zone.

The celebrated Lusitania, sunk by a German U-boat in 1915, carried just such a mixed cargo of babies and bullets. Wilson’s eloquence notwithstanding, the Germans were perfectly justified in sinking it and other such vessels. In fact, there is a continuing controversy over whether British officials, particularly then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, hoped the Lusitania would end up on the ocean floor, thereby inflaming American opinion against Berlin.

The war offers many ugly precedents. There was, for instance, the brilliant British propaganda, which convinced the world that the “Huns” were ravaging Europe. Alas, it was all false, but it helped drive America into the war. Joseph Goebbels modeled the Nazi effort after that of the British.

There was also the war against noncombatants. London imposed a “hunger blockade,” denying foodstuffs to all European civilians, even though it was against international law. Britain maintained the blockade even after Germany had surrendered. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation.

Finally, soldiers were treated as cannon fodder to be slaughtered. The Western front became a static “sausage machine” once trenches stabilized positions in the fall of 1914. From then through the spring of 1918 no attack moved the lines more than ten miles.

The French mutineers about whom Chirac and Jospin quarreled represented soldiers refusing to lose their lives in useless offensives pushed by fantastically overoptimistic generals who commanded far from the front. Who could blame the poilus for resisting?

Especially since the politicians knew what was going on. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George admitted that people could not be told the truth about the war or they would end it the next day. He finally limited troop replacements to the front because of what he termed the generals’ “reckless wastage of the manpower so lavishly placed at their disposal.”

No one was immune from the effects of this reckless wastage. The carnage sparked revolution in Russia, breakup in Austria-Hungary, dissatisfaction with democratic politics in Italy, and, most important, collapse in Germany.

Unfortunately, after all this mindless bloodletting, the Allies came up with a peace that French Marshal Ferdinand Foch presciently called “an armistice for 20 years.” The Allies blamed Germany for the war, dismembered Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, plundered the defeated states, awarded Third World peoples to the victors like prizes in a sporting competition, and mixed different ethnic groups in a host of unstable new nations.

A decade later Britain was embarrassed by its handiwork and refused to defend it; France lost the will to act alone. They would neither ruthlessly enforce Versailles to contain Germany nor voluntarily revise the treaty to conciliate Germany. Then came Adolf Hitler, and the Allies yielded on every point. World War II was not long in coming—followed inexorably by the Cold War.

Even today we are not free of the lingering effects of World War I. The continuing Balkan civil wars are a bloody bit of unfinished business from Versailles in 1919.

The world was full of hope 80 years ago, as Allied leaders sought to create the world anew. But they failed: not only did ten million people die in vain, but some 40 million more would perish a generation later. It is the kind of history that we cannot afford to repeat.

Gene Healy is a student at the University of Chicago Law School.

Historians who evaluate American presidents suffer from a bias against inaction. In the conventional view, great presidents are the nation builders and the war leaders; the failures are the ones who “never did anything.”

Nathan Miller, author of Star-Spangled Men: America’s Ten Worst Presidents, shares the conventional bias. For example, he indicts Silent Cal Coolidge with Mencken’s faint praise: “He had no ideas, and was not a nuisance.”

Those of us who favor limited government see it differently. This would have been a happier century by far if the worst that could be said of any president was, “He had no ideas, and was not a nuisance.” One (unintended) virtue of Miller’s book, then, is that it reminds us of some of the forgotten men who have held America’s most powerful office, yet somehow managed to leave well enough alone.

Miller picks his losers by asking, “How badly did they damage the nation they were supposed to serve?” What’s strange, then, is that the presidents he selects were mostly peacetime leaders who did little perceptible damage to the Republic and its institutions.

Take Coolidge, whom Miller writes off as “a reluctant refugee from the nineteenth century.” Miller fairly sneers at Coolidge’s emphasis on fiscal probity and laissez faire. Unable to find much to criticize in the uninterrupted prosperity of Coolidge’s tenure, Miller tries a cheap shot: Coolidge’s “penny-pinching refusal to cancel [the war] debts contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler.” Well, maybe. But as long as we’re doling out responsibility for Nazi atrocities, why don’t we give some to Woodrow Wilson? Wilson’s dragging the United States into World War I allowed the Allies to impose a punitive peace on Germany in the first place. Why, then, does Miller consider Wilson a “near great” president?

Unlike Wilson, Coolidge was never awake for long enough to do much damage; as Miller recounts, he slept 11 hours a day. During his waking hours, Silent Cal’s sound instincts allowed him to hew to the presidential equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath. As Coolidge put it, “Nine-tenths of a president’s callers at the White House want something they ought not to have. If you keep dead still they will run out in three or four minutes.”

Miller’s chapter on William Howard Taft inspires reflection on the varieties of presidential obesity. Mencken saw Grover Cleveland’s great bulk as indicating a kind of implacable strength. But Taft’s girth reflected placidity and inaction, complementing his sedate view of the presidency: “the president cannot make clouds to rain, he cannot make the corn to grow, he cannot make business to be good.” Miller rates Taft as the ninth worst, but his tenure in the White House was marked by peace and prosperity.

Warren G. Harding receives the most undeservedly rough treatment of any president examined. From a classical liberal perspective, Harding was arguably the greatest president of the twentieth century. He initiated the largest spending cut in history—a 40 percent reduction from Wilson’s last peacetime budget. And Harding’s good nature and liberal instincts led him to overrule his political advisers and pardon Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. Debs had been jailed during Wilson’s jihad against opponents of World War I, but Harding turned him and other dissenters loose; “I want [Debs] to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife,” he said. The scandals surrounding Harding’s administration push him near the top of Miller’s hit list. But, as Miller notes, he never took “so much as a nickel” from any of his corrupt cronies.

Despite the author’s depressingly conventional perspective on presidential greatness, Star-Spangled Men is tremendously enjoyable. Miller can turn a memorable phrase: (for example, he writes that Kissinger “looked like a Bronx Butcher and operated with the cynicism of a Renaissance Cardinal”) and has an eye for the kind of detail that makes reading history fun.

Read with the proper attitude, Star-Spangled Men inspires reflection on what we should value in a president.

Burton Folsom is senior fellow at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. He is author of The Myth of the Robber Barons and Empire Builders.

“The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story has such tremendous lessons, for the American people and for the rest of mankind.” So begins Paul Johnson in his upbeat and first-rate A History of the American People.

As a British historian and non-academic, Johnson avoids the pitfalls of so many American historians. Academic historians in particular often impose a double straitjacket on U.S. history: first, that economic issues have been paramount in shaping American politics; and second, that government intervention in the American economy has been necessary and benign. Johnson disputes both of these points.

Johnson gives due attention to economic issues, but he also highlights the crucial role of religion in shaping American history. For example, he takes the Puritans seriously as men of ideas. Later, he analyzes the Great Awakening, the religious fervor of the 1740s. “The Great Awakening,” Johnson argues, “was thus the proto-revolutionary event, the formative moment in American history, preceding the political drive for independence and making it possible.” George Whitefield, its leader, “was the first ‘American’ public figure, equally well known from Georgia to New Hampshire.”

In Johnson’s history, the rise of America to world prominence is a fascinating story, full of key inventions and daring entrepreneurs. Liberty, not government, is what extended the American dream to millions of Americans, immigrants and natives alike, during the 1800s.

The 1900s might well be called the century of big government in U.S. history. “It was [President Woodrow] Wilson who first introduced America to big, benevolent government,” Johnson asserts. But Wilson “was corrupted by power, and the more he had of it the deeper the corruption bit, like acid in his soul.”

Johnson prefers Calvin Coolidge: “No one in the 20th century defined more elegantly the limitations of government and the need for individual endeavor, which necessarily involves inequalities, to advance human happiness.” Coolidge cut taxes, promoted free enterprise, and had the lowest misery index (inflation plus unemployment) of any president in this century. “Of those who came to power at the same time as Coolidge, all the most notable were dedicated to expanding the role of the state.”

When the Great Depression hit, both Hoover and Roosevelt brought bigger government to America—and much of it had negative consequences, according to Johnson. “No series of events in modern history is surrounded by more mythology than the New Deal,” Johnson writes. “There was no actual economic policy behind the program.” Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Republican Nixon expanded government further. But, Johnson says, Ronald Reagan, a “conservative revolutionary,” challenged the Democratic hegemony. Johnson curiously ignores Nixon’s failed economic intervention, but praises him for challenging the Kennedy money and the “liberal” media.

Johnson’s history is a superlative achievement, not only for his knowledge and insights but also because he is an able writer and captivating storyteller. In a recent interview, Johnson showed impatience with historians who “niggle” at his work, but more niggling by his editors would have cleared up a variety of misspellings and minor errors. Zachary Taylor was a Whig, not a Democrat; it’s Alfred Sloan, not “Sloane,” and John W. Davis, not “Davies.” But let me niggle no more.

Critics accuse Johnson of being biased, but he is in fact balanced and nuanced in his treatment of historical events and personalities. Johnson appears biased to other historians because so many of them are accustomed to teaching from the standard “liberal” texts that dominate the market—for example, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Oxford History of the American People.

Where Johnson treats Coolidge with respect, Morison lashes out, calling him “a mean, thin-lipped little man, a respectable mediocrity . . . dour, abstemious, and unimaginative.” Where Johnson dissects the New Deal, Morison is filled with gushing praise, saying that it was “just what the term implied—a new deal of old cards, no longer stacked against the common man. . . . Probably it saved the capitalist system in the United States.”

These snippets are typical of the “history” most Americans have learned. Johnson’s excellent work often stands in opposition to the conventional wisdom. It deserves a wide readership among students as well as adults, and if so, we may yet train our next generation to appreciate American history.

President Bill Clinton has run for public office for the last time. No longer subject to judgment by the voters, he is now accountable only to history, or at least to the historians who write the history books.

Nearly 50 years ago historian Arthur Schlesinger organized a poll of 55 historians to rate America’s presidents. Schlesinger staged a repeat in 1962. Some journalists subsequently conducted their own surveys. Now Schlesinger’s son, writer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has organized yet another survey of the historical establishment. The results of all these efforts are predictable. Presidential greatness is defined as action, the more frenetic the better. Which means big government, the more intrusive the better.

Abraham Lincoln tops the list, a unanimous choice for greatness. There’s no doubt that he was a skillful politician and succeeded in his primary goal of preserving the union. But was it worth plunging the nation into a war that killed 620,000 Americans? His predecessor, James Buchanan, is judged to be a failure and indeed Buchanan did much to exacerbate sectional tensions. But he, at least, held back from the fateful step of making war on states that only sought to peacefully depart the union.

Lincoln also began a tradition of subverting constitutional liberties. He unilaterally suspended habeas corpus; his administration jailed political opponents, banned critical newspapers from the mails, and manipulated border state elections. At his urging Congress conscripted men into the army and turned paper money into legal tender. Moreover, the Civil War proved the truth of the adage that war is the health of the state: Abraham Lincoln created the first national government that intimately intruded into the lives of its citizens.

Second in the rankings is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This president, too, was a political master. His economic policies were a failure, however. The New Deal, as he termed it, might have improved Americans’ morale, but it did not spark a sustained recovery. Now, decades later, we are reaping the bitter harvest of many of his misguided initiatives: deposit insurance, which led to the S&L debacle; Social Security, which is heading over a fiscal cliff; and pervasive government meddling, which has slowed our economy’s growth and reduced our freedom.

Moreover, while his wartime leadership may have been competent, he had a wildly naive view of mass murderer Joseph Stalin. Equally important, Roosevelt maneuvered secretly to drag the United States into the worst war in human history, a decision which deserved to be debated fully by the American people. Finally, he committed perhaps the single greatest violation of civil liberties of any president—the incarceration of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans based on their national origin. Equally grotesque was his administration’s refusal to allow the entry of Jewish refugees even while the Nazis were destroying European Jewry.

The third and last great president is George Washington. He is the only one who deserves that designation, as much for what he did not do as for what he did. President Washington, in contrast to so many of his successors, rejected the opportunity to accumulate power. Nor did he see America’s role as that of an international nanny; to the contrary, he warned against foreign entanglements. He truly believed in individual liberty and republican government.

The near-greats are led by Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson who, like Washington, are good selections. Both had their flaws; the latter favored slavery, for instance. But neither mistook a desire to expand state authority with public-spiritedness. Both inveighed against the use of government to enrich the politically powerful.

Next in line, however, is Woodrow Wilson, a man who pushed the United States into World War I and sacrificed 110,000 lives in his belief that he had been anointed to save mankind. His administration was the most repressive in U.S. history; it persecuted critics of both conscription and the war and inflamed popular hysteria against anyone who demonstrated anything other than enthusiasm for the president’s policies. Wilson even proposed outlawing criticism of the government. He ended his presidency crippled by a stroke but hanging onto power by deceiving the public.

Then comes Theodore Roosevelt. He was a complex and fascinating man, but his appetite for war was probably unmatched by any other president. The specific opponent didn’t matter—over the years he advocated conflict with Britain, Germany, and Spain. Rather, he believed in war as a matter of principle. His view of non-Western peoples was disgraceful. His interventionist economics ultimately made the economy less, not more, competitive.

The next near-great is Harry S. Truman. President Truman is impressive only insofar as he rose above the worst sort of machine politics with a performance adequate to avoid disaster in the dangerous post-World War II era. But his international policies exacerbated the Cold War, yielding the national security state and outsized military that plague us to this day. His mistakes in Korea turned a small regional conflict into a lengthy war with China. Constitutional limits did not deter him, as exhibited by his attempted seizure of the steel industry. His domestic policies were marked by inefficient economic intervention.

The last of the almost-greats is James Knox Polk, an unabashed imperialist. He initiated what was, truth be told, a war of aggression against Mexico that led to the seizure of half of that nation’s territory. He was frugal when it came to economics, but his belief that territorial expansion warranted war was more befitting a twentieth-century dictator. Today we can thank him for the addition of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas; the people subjugated by U.S. troops probably had a different view, however.

In contrast, Dwight Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War, warned against militarism, and moderated domestic federal expenditures, is judged to be merely average. At least he now comes in better than he did in 1962—an embarrassing 22nd out of 31.

Calvin Coolidge, who presided over prosperity and peace, is rated below average. He had no grand initiatives, since there was no cause for grand initiatives. But to establishment historians, leaving the American people alone is considered to be a sign of mediocrity, not greatness.

Warren Harding, whose associates were notoriously corrupt, is termed a failure. But it was Harding who restored civil liberties after the repressive Wilson era. He also kept America aloof from France’s vindictive post-World War I policies and presided over a strong economy. This is a better record than that amassed by most of the supposed greats and near greats.

What will history say of Bill Clinton? It’s too early to tell, though historians obviously like presidents who send the military into action around the globe, propose massive new social programs, and talk endlessly in action-oriented terms.

However, the judgment that matters most will be that of history—as reflected in the actions of millions and billions of people around the globe. Already they have rendered their verdict on the ruthless totalitarians who were venerated as demigods earlier this century. Those dictators’ monuments have been toppled and their memories are now execrated. As what historian Paul Johnson calls the age of politics recedes in America too, many of the great and near-great presidents are likely to find their reputations falling in the same way. Presidents mesmerized by power and willing to sacrifice American lives, wealth, and freedom for social engineering projects at home and abroad will find history, if not historians, to be unkind.