Terry Bouton's Taming Democracy

In Taming Democracy (2007), Terry Bouton gives a thoroughly somber interpretation of the achievements of popular economic and political reforms within Pennsylvania resulting from the American Revolution. Bouton argues that despite increased suffrage and political participation, the majority of “ordinary people” were disappointed in the system of democracy which evolved in the decades following independence. While a significant proportion of white males achieved notable political rights as a result of the revolutionary movement, “in terms of economic well-being that gave independence its meaning, life in postwar Pennsylvanian resembled the dark days of the 1760s and 1770s.” The elite class of society, who during the 1760s and 1770s supported …show more content…
Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). Wood argues that instead of increasing in prominence, by 1800 the revolutionary leaders could do little more than watch helplessly as their utopian vision of a republican society based on civic virtue was mutated into a democratic system centered on the self-interest and personal greed of ordinary Americans. The same elites who had made “the interests and prosperity of ordinary people- their pursuits of happiness- the goal of society and government,” found themselves struggling against a wave of corruption they could not hope to stop. These gentlemen of society placed safeguards into the governmental framework to ensure that the “betters” of society, those disinterested individuals, would retain positions necessary to determine the common good. This effort culminated in the ratification of the United States Constitution, which Bouton counters as the embodiment of elitist authoritarianism. By the 1820s however, Wood describes the disillusionment of the surviving revolutionary leaders as the era of Jacksonian democracy saw the complete reversal of their ideological