A History of the American People

and productive classes.' He compared this new financial power with the old feudal and
ecclesiastical power, with the bankers using force, faith and credit' as the two others did religion and feudality. What particularly infuriated Taylor was the horrible slyness with which financiers had investedfictitious' property, such as bank-paper and stock, with all the prestige and virtues
of honest' property. Taylor's theory was an early version of what was to become known as thephysical fallacy,' a
belief that only those who worked with their hands and brains to raise food or make goods were
creating real' wealth and that all other forms of economic activity were essentially parasitical. It was commonly held in the early 19th century, and Marx and all his followers fell victim to it. Indeed plenty of people hold it in one form or another today, and whenever its adherents acquire power, or seize it, and put their beliefs into practice, by oppressing the 'parasitical middleman,' poverty invariably follows. Taylor's formulation of the theory fell on a particularly rich soil because American farmers in general, and the Southerners and backwoodsmen in particular, already had a paranoid suspicion of themoney power' dating from colonial times, as we have
seen. So Taylor's arguments, suitably vulgarized, became the common coin of the Jeffersonians,
later of the Jacksonians and finally of silver-standard Democrats and populists of the late 19th
century, who claimed that the American farmer was being crucified on a cross of gold.' The persistence of this fallacy in American politics refutes the common assumption that America is resistant to ideology, for if ever there were an ideology it is this farrago. Fortunately Marshall set his face against it, and he had the power-or rather he acquired the power-to make his views law. His view of how the American Republic should function was clear and consistent. He had read Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France as soon as it was published in America and it inspired in him a healthy revulsion against the mob which lasted till his dying day. The people might not always constitute a mob. But they were always to be distrusted as an unfettered political force. The role of the Constitution therefore was to fence the people in. In Marshall's analysis, the popular power in America was essentially vested in the states, for they had been the first, in his own lifetime, to enfranchise the masses. Hence he was not only a federalist but a centralist, who thought the primary role of the general government was to balance the power of the mob which was latent in the states. The Constitution may not have said this explicitly. But the thought was implicit in its provisions, and it was the role and duty of the federal judiciary to reveal the hidden mysteries of the Constitution by its decisions. Thus he asserted, for the first time, the right of the Supreme Court to play its full part in the constitutional process by its powers of interpretation. As he put it in one of his judgments,We must never
forget it is a Constitution we are expounding ... something organic, capable of growth,
susceptible to change.' Marshall was a graceful persuader with a subtle and resourceful mind,
fertile in sinewy arguments, expressed with a silver tongue and a pen of gold. He lived very close
to his brethren during the six or eight weeks the court sat in Washington, all of them residing
together in the same modest boarding house so that, as his biographer said, Marshall was `head
of a family as much as he was chief of a court. He was absolutely dominant among his
colleagues, though less learned than some of them. During his thirty-four years as head of the
court it laid down 1,100 rulings, 519 of which he wrote himself, and he was in a dissenting
minority only eight times.
Next to Burke, Marshall revered Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. He was closer to its spirit
than Hamilton, believing the state should be chary of interfering in the natural process of the
economy. Left to themselves, and with the law holding the ring so that all were free to exert the
utmost of their powers, industrious men and women were capable unaided of fructifying