| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution. By Woody Holton. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. xii, 370 pp. Cloth, $27.00, ISBN 978-0-8090-8061-8.)

Early American historiography has sometimes suffered from a monochromatic focus on a small group of elites, as though George Washington and company invented a nation all by themselves. In Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Woody Holton adds color to the group portrait of the Founders, and the primary color on his palette is green—the color of money. To his neo-Progressive eye, the overriding motive of the constitutional Framers was "not to safeguard civil liberties" (p. xi), but rather to protect their own and the country's financial interests. Holton privileges the arguments and efforts of "ordinary farmers" who believed the recession that followed the Revolution could have been ended "without making the United States a less democratic country," as the Framers in fact made it (p. 17). It was they who forced upon the Framers a bill of rights, and if Americans today are grateful for their civil liberties, it is those unruly folk who agitated for the first ten amendments we should thank, not the Framers (p. xi).

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