Forrest McDonald, noted historian of the U.S. Constitution and much more, died 10 years ago, on January 19, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
He was a professor of history at Brown University from 1958 to 1967, including when I was an undergraduate student there (1962-66). For me, the timing was fortuitous.
He came up by the old route; he wrote a book that forced smart people to argue with it. In 1958, a year before he joined the Brown faculty, he published We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution. It took aim at an older (1913) and enormously influential argument by the Progressive Era (1890 to 1920) historian, Charles A. Beard, whose An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States had persuaded a profession drawn to economic determinism that the Constitution was, at bottom, shaped by the property interests of the men who wrote and ratified it.
Beard offered a neat framework: identify the “personalty” interests behind the Constitution, especially the holders of public securities and other forms of movable property, and you can explain why certain elites wanted a stronger national government. Beard summarized his conclusions as describing the movement for a Constitution as carried by groups tied to money, public securities, manufactures, and trade, and claiming that ratification exposed a cleavage between “personalty” interests and agrarian/debtor interests.
McDonald didn’t refute Beard by waving his hands and saying, “Human beings aren’t that simple.” He went looking for the receipts. What did these men own? What did they owe? What did they do for a living? Who were they connected to? What did the ratifying delegates—hundreds and then thousands of them—look like when you stop talking about them as abstractions and start reconstructing them as actual citizens with ledgers and land and commercial paper?
Publishers like to describe scholarship as “exhaustive,” but in this case it is fair. In a contemporary scholarly review of We the People (1958), Clifton J. Phillips emphasized the “depth and extent” of McDonald’s search in printed and manuscript materials, ranging beyond Treasury records into town and county histories, newspapers, census reports, and “a host of financial and other manuscript records in state and local archives.”
McDonald’s conclusion was not that economics was irrelevant, but that Beard’s alignment of interests did not hold. He did not find a consistent pattern in which supporters formed a unified bloc. Their various motivations were tangled with non-economic factors such as Enlightenment philosophy, patriotism, and experience with state constitutions. McDonald didn’t just challenge a narrowly economic interpretation of the Constitution. He raised the bar for the evidentiary burden on any historical argument that seeks material motives for political actions.
McDonald’s early scholarship pushed historiography toward what is called “prosopography” (investigation of the common characteristics of a group of people), or archival reconstruction, or empirically testable claims, rather than interpretation anchored in an overarching theory. His mature work, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (1985), insisted that the early republic cannot be explained by ideas alone, either. The Framers’ intellectual world and political behavior were shaped by experience, inherited legal traditions, and prudential problem-solving. At the beginning of his career, in other words, McDonald took aim at economic determinism. Later, he challenged the “ideas first” approach of scholars including Bernard Bailyn, J.G.A. Pocock, and Gordon Wood.
Novus Ordo Seclorum shows the founding to be a pragmatic product, constituted from a “vastly complex intellectual mélange,” including natural law and rights theories, multiple strands of republican ideology, Montesquieu’s taxonomy of political power in The Spirit of the Laws, English legal tradition, and the Scottish Enlightenment. American independence and the early republic thus cease to be a morality play revolving around equal individual rights. One McDonald legacy is that he offers a way out of false alternatives such as “interests versus ideas” or “republicanism versus liberalism”. History, like life, is a kind of entanglement.
A Barefoot Boy in the Ivy League
I knew all this only later. As a sophomore in 1964, I sensed Forrest was the rare professor who wasn’t trying to recruit you into a moral posture. He was trying to arm you with a way of thinking. He could be eloquent indeed on the subject of his own profession: “Titans and paupers, tycoons and proletarians, those who have won and those who have lost; all wanted to distort or destroy—to fix—that part of the past in which they had lived. This is why they wanted to buy my memory. But my memory is not for sale. Not for drink, nor money, nor even for love. I am both fallible and corrupt, but my memory, though fallible, is incorruptible.”
McDonald was born in Orange, Texas, earned his degrees in Austin, and carried a trace of that origin with him . Years later, returning to Brown to give a hugely popular lecture, he used the title “A Barefoot Boy from Texas in the Ivy League”.
If you did not experience the ‘sixties, you might not appreciate what that meant. In 1964, the Brown campus vibrated with certainty. Barry Goldwater ran for president, and many professors seemed barely able to restrain themselves from attacking him in class. Whether they were right about Goldwater is almost beside the point. What mattered to me then was how casually the professorial authority could be used to press a student toward the approved conclusion. The professor of pre-colonial American history, Carl Bridenbaugh, referred to the Republican presidential candidate in class as “the boy.”
Forrest was different. When he did take a side, he did it openly, like a person who believed adults could survive disagreement. He debated professor of German history, Klaus Epstein, on Goldwater versus Lyndon Johnson before a huge campus crowd and was hailed as winner by the Brown Daily Herald.
Forrest also had a gift for making a classroom feel like a workshop instead of a chapel. One of the first assignments I remember, for his “American History” course, became instantly memorable: he asked us to write an essay describing the workings of the internal combustion engine. The logic: If you don’t know that, you don’t know much about the twentieth century. That wasn’t a line from a theory. It was the sort of practical provocation that teaches a student what history includes: not only presidents and wars, but the mechanisms that change what a society can do.
Forrest seemed more at ease with students than with faculty ceremonies. “Forrie,” some students called him—a name that would have sounded absurd applied to other professors. One story I remember: a firecracker thrown during a motorcycle ride with his student buddies on the East Side of Providence, a young woman injured, and Forrest claiming responsibility—almost certainly because he was protecting a student.
Other stories were lighter. I remember his smoking in class—this was before the age of institutional hygiene—and flicking the remains of cigarettes out the nearest window. That habit was not only mischievous; it was a tiny declaration of independence. An announcement that the classroom was not going to become a sanitized theater of approved behavior.
Remembering (the Real) Samuel Insull
In 1962, still at Brown, McDonald published Insull, a biography of the then-famous Chicago businessman. Insull had been rhetorically branded by Franklin Roosevelt, in a major 1932 campaign speech, as a “lone wolf” promoter, as “the Ishmael or Insull whose hand is against every man’s”—making Insull a symbol of predatory disruption. Once a man becomes that kind of symbol, it becomes professionally safer to ignore him than to complicate him.
McDonald’s biography tried to set down the facts in a way that might show Insull more favorably, tracing his work with Thomas Edison, his rise in the utilities industry, and the arc of collapse and legal reckoning that faced his enterprises. To McDonald, Insull was not a financial schemer who chanced upon electricity. He was the entrepreneur who made electric power economically and socially viable throughout the American Midwest, benefitting millions of Americans.
Zooming back for a wider perspective, McDonald landed a direct hit on a Progressive-era myth of predatory “robber barons”. McDonald’s decision to write a full-dress biography was a historiographical intervention: again, he forced narrative complexity into a space that had become symbolically simplified. McDonald could be very salty on the topic of moral crusades, commenting in class once that “periodically the American people get a moral hard-on” about an issue. Insull was a cold shower for the politically excited.
The Tides of Historiography
McDonald left Brown in 1967, a year after I was graduated. Leaving the Ivy League, he went to teach at Wayne State University (1967–1976). He continued to select strategic targets for history and in 1974 got further into the politics of business in America. In The Phaeton Ride he challenged not only historians and political scientists, but the conventional wisdom, with a thesis about the “alliance” of reform and regulation. If Insull complicates a businessman-villain, The Phaeton Ride makes explicit the “interpretive machinery” that manufactures such villains. McDonald saw the Progressive movement as cloaked in anti-commercial moral language that won politicians credit for “getting tough” with business while in fact creating arrangements that could benefit powerful economic interests.
But McDonald still resisted simplistic libertarian readings. It was not that government was bad and business good; it was the hybrid system—today we might say “cronyism”—that was producing outcomes that neither classical Progressives nor simplistic laissez-faire advocates could justify.
McDonald’s next professional move was back to Dixie. He took a position at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa until his retirement in 2002. Viewed from Providence, it might look like a retreat from the big time. But perhaps it was more consistent with McDonald’s “barefoot boy” identity. Alabama also fits another aspect of his trajectory: his willingness to write sympathetically about figures and even regions that polite academic taste often treated with suspicion.
In a recollection published after McDonald’s death, a former student, the historian Adam Tate, wrote: “As a teacher at the University of Alabama, [McDonald] exemplified this. Usually in class, he sits at a table in the front of the room, takes out an index card with a few scribbled words, and, with an almost mischievous gleam in his eyes, begins telling a story. The story derived from his vast knowledge. He lectured just as he wrote his numerous books and articles, with verve and precision. He would quote sources, tell anecdotes he picked up reading 18th century newspapers, and craft a compelling narrative of events. His powers of recall were tremendous. He rarely mentioned either himself or current events. Instead, he tried through his lectures to immerse his class in the world that he knew and loved so well, that of the early American republic.”
The teaching legacy described by Tate is not incidental to the historiographical impact of McDonald’s work. McDonald’s books and his teaching reinforced the same ethic: claims must be tethered to specific evidence; the past is not a moral allegory engineered to validate contemporary identities; and the historian’s duty is to reconstruct worlds, not simply to prosecute them.
In 1987, McDonald received one of his profession’s highest honors: selection for the National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture. Its title was “The Intellectual World of the Founding Fathers.” That subject—ideas, intellectual context—also signals something important about his evolution. Early reviews of We the People noted that one limitation of staying close to Beard’s framework was that it constrained investigation of the role of ideas. McDonald’s later work moved more explicitly into intellectual history.
At Alabama, McDonald became associated with arguments about Southern distinctiveness rooted in ethnic-cultural origins. One accessible example is a coauthored piece “Celtic Names in the Antebellum Southern United States” (1983), which frames Southern myths and tests ethnic-origin claims using surname evidence. The piece supported a “Celtic-Southern thesis” that distinctive Southern cultural patterns reflected the sources of early settlement. This line of thought was not quietly absorbed by the historical profession. On the other hand, Thomas Sowell applies the “Celtic borderlands” thesis wholesale to explain Black ghetto culture today in Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
Remembering Forrest McDonald
Whatever one makes of his specific arguments I come back to the way McDonald treated history as a discipline: evidence, argument, imagination, and the nerve to say to one’s colleagues, I don’t think that’s true. Most universities can tolerate a brilliant scholar. Fewer can tolerate an independent one. And fewer still can tolerate independence when it is paired with charm—because charm brings students, and students create a public, and a public creates risk.
To name what he gave his students, beyond any particular content, it was permission: permission not to conform intellectually; permission to take ideas seriously without turning them into moral theatre; permission to admire the past without idolizing it; permission to criticize it without sneering.
Forrest came along when American progressivism was riding high. A Southerner, a Texan, and viscerally conservative of American ideals and values, Forrest did not counter Beard and other progressives with ideology. He refuted history-as-ideology by letting massed facts, new facts—all the facts—speak. He won the joust, and with him American historiography won.
Yet it would be a mistake to read Forrest as an intellectual activist of the right rather than as honest scholar. Later, when a generation of conservative historians began interpreting the U.S. founding in terms of a “good” ideology (the Enlightenment, Locke, Montesquieu) Forrest again said no. He marshaled his facts masterfully in Novus Ordo Seclorum, showing the early republic did not spring out of the pages of books but was the product of a complicated, contingent set of intellectual, political, and, yes, economic factors. In an age of postmodernist ideological historiography—and humanities generally—the teaching of Forrest McDonald has not lost its revolutionary potency. But will we learn from his example?
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