172 Chapter VIII
against the dangers of popular rule. The Philadelphia convention has been repre-
sented as an almost clandestine body, which exceeded its powers, and which man-
aged (as has also been said of the Massachu- setts convention of 1780) to impose a
conservative constitution on a confused or apathetic people. Recently the flimsi-
ness of the evidence for this famous thesis has been shown by Professor Robert
Brown.^20 The thesis takes its place in the history of historical writing, as a product
of that Progressive and post- Progressive era in which the common man could be
viewed as the dupe or plaything of private interests.
It seems likely enough that there was a conservative reaction after the American
Revolution, and even a movement among the upper class (minus the old loyalists)
not wholly unlike the “aristocratic resurgence” which I shall soon describe in the
Europe of the 1780’s. The difference is that these neo- aristocrats of America were
less obstinate and less caste- conscious than in Europe. They did not agree with
each other, and they knew they could not rule alone. The men at Philadelphia in
1787 were too accomplished as politicians to be motivated by anything so imprac-
tical as ideology or mere self- interest. They hoped, while solving concrete prob-
lems, to arouse as little opposition as possible. They lacked also the European sense
of the permanency of class status. Thinking of an upper class as something that
individuals might move into or out of, they allowed for social mobility both up-
ward and downward. The wealthy Virginian, George Mason, at the Philadelphia
convention, on urging that the upper class should take care to give adequate repre-
sentation to the lower, offered it as one of his reasons that, however affluent they
might be now, “the course of a few years not only might, but certainly would, dis-
tribute their posterity through the lowest classes of society.”^21 No one seems to
have disputed this prognostication. Such acceptance of future downward mobility
for one’s own grandchildren, if by no means universal in America, was far more
common than in Europe. Without such downward mobility there could not long
remain much room for newcomers at the top, or much assurance of a fluid society.
With it, there could not be a permanent aristocracy in the European sense.
It was the state legislatures that chose the delegates to the Philadelphia con-
vention, in answer to a widely expressed demand for strengthening the federal
government under the Articles of Confederation. The Philadelphia convention
proceeded, not to amend the Articles, but to ignore and discard them. It repudi-
ated the union which the thirteen states had made. Beard in 1913 found it satis-
fying to call this operation a revolution, a revolution from above to be sure, which
he compared to a coup d ’état of Napoleon. His critic, Professor Brown, in 1956,
found it satisfying and important to deny any revolutionary action in what
happened.
What did really happen? The men at Philadelphia did circumvent the state gov-
ernments, and in a sense they betrayed those who sent them. They did so by adopt-
ing the revolutionary principle of the American Revolution, which had already
become less purely revolutionary and more institutionalized as an accepted rou-
20 R. E. Brown, Charles Beard and the Constitution: a Critical Analysis of “An Economic Interpreta-
tion of the Constitution” (Princeton, 1956). The critique of Beard is carried even further in a more recent
work, Forrest McDonald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, 1958).
21 Writings of James Madison, 9 vols. (N.Y., 1902–1910), III, 47.