Forrest McDonald


Forrest McDonald was an American historian who wrote extensively on the early national period of the United States, republicanism, and the presidency, but he is possibly best known for his polemic on the American South. He was a professor at the University of Alabama, where, together with Grady McWhiney, he developed the hypothesis that the South had been colonized by "Anglo-Celts," rather than the British Protestant farmers who populated the North.

Life

McDonald was born in Orange, Texas. He took his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied with Fulmer Mood. He taught at Brown University, Wayne State University, and the University of Alabama before he retired He was for a time the president of the Philadelphia Society. He died in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on January 19, 2016, twelve days after his 89th birthday.

Historical arguments

The historian Carl L. Becker in History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776 formulated the Progressive interpretation of the American Revolution. He said that there were two revolutions: one against Britain to obtain home rule and the other to determine who should rule at home. Charles A. Beard, in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States and An Economic Interpretation of Jeffersonian Democracy, extended Becker's thesis down to 1800 in terms of class conflict. To Beard, the Constitution was a counter-revolution set up by rich bond holders in opposition to the farmers and planters. The Constitution, Beard argued, was designed to reverse the radical democratic tendencies unleashed by the Revolution among the common people, especially farmers and debtors. In 1800, according to Beard, the farmers and debtors, led by plantation slave owners, overthrew the capitalists and established Jeffersonian democracy. Other historians supported the class conflict interpretation by noting that the states confiscated great semifeudal landholdings of Loyalists and gave them out in small parcels to ordinary farmers. Conservatives, such as William Howard Taft, were shocked at the Progressive interpretation because it seem to belittle the Constitution. Scholars, however, adopted it, and by 1930, it became the standard interpretation of the era among academic historians but was largely ignored by lawyers and jurists. Beginning about 1950, revisionist historians led by Charles A. Barker, Philip Crowl, Richard P. McCormick, William Pool, Robert Thomas, John Munroe, Robert E. Brown and B. Kathryn Brown, and especially McDonald, showed that the Progressive interpretation was factually incorrect. Controversy raged, but by 1970 the Progressive Era interpretation was dead. It was largely replaced by the intellectual history approach that stressed the power of ideas, especially republicanism in stimulating the Revolution.
In We The People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, McDonald argued that Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States had misinterpreted the economic interests involved in writing the Constitution. Instead of two conflicting interests, landed and mercantile, there were three-dozen identifiable interests, which forced the delegates to bargain. The reviewer David M. Potter said: "He has tumbled a very large Humpty Dumpty from a very high wall of history, and American historical literature will never be entirely the same."
McDonald and his colleague Grady McWhiney presented the "Celtic hypothesis" that stated that the distinctiveness culture of the South derives largely from the majority of the Southern population being descendants of Celtic herdsmen and the majority of the Northern population being the descendants of farmers.
In 1987, the 200th anniversary of the Constitution, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected McDonald for the Jefferson Lecture, the federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. His lecture was entitled "The Intellectual World of the Founding Fathers." In a New York Times article after his selection, McDonald was quoted as saying that the federal government had "lost its capacity to protect people in life, liberty and property, to provide for the common defense, or to promote the general welfare." However, in interviews and in his Jefferson Lecture, McDonald opposed the idea of a new constitutional convention, partly because he felt that such a convention would become a "runaway" and a "catastrophe" partly because he thought the inefficiency of the American government was a saving virtue that limits its capacity for oppression; and partly because he felt that it would now be impossible to assemble a group as capable as the 55 delegates who attended the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which took place in an era that McDonald called "America's Golden Age, the likes of which we shall not see again."
McDonald's lecture was later described by conservative historian George H. Nash as "a luminous introduction to the intellectual world of the Founding Fathers." However, McDonald faced criticism for not acknowledging the imperfection of slavery in the original constitutional framework. The New York Times pointedly noted that on the same day as McDonald's Jefferson Lecture, US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall gave a speech that criticized "complacent belief" in the perfection of the Constitution because of the stain of slavery. The Times quoted McDonald's answer that at the time of the Constitutional Convention, "Slavery was a fact. It had simply not crossed many people's intellectual or moral horizons to question it," and he further commented, "The condition of the French peasants was far worse than that of the American slaves, and that was heaven compared to the Russian serf."
"The Intellectual World of the Founding Fathers" was republished in the essay collection, Requiem: Variations on Eighteenth-Century Themes. In a 1994 interview, McDonald noted that when he was selected for the Jefferson Lecture, he was on record in favor of abolishing the NEH and so had refused to accept the $10,000 award that went with the honor although he had not made that refusal public at the time. In the same interview, when asked about his political views, McDonald described himself simply as a "conservative." When the interviewer followed up by asking, "How conservative?" McDonald responded, "Paleo."
He stated in 2011, "I am an unreconstructed Hamiltonian Federalist, and out of my admiration for Alexander Hamilton I have long been disposed to believe the worst about Thomas Jefferson."
Steven Siry stated:
Andrew Ferguson stated:

Books