Free Republic

"As an interpreter of American constitutional government, McDonald has achieved a national reputation among historians, statesmen, and the literary public that began with the publication of We The People in 1958. Respected historians David M. Potter and C. Vann Woodward praised We The People in the pages of the Saturday Review and the New York Times, and shortly after the book's publication McDonald appeared on NBC's "Continental Classroom" television show. He delivered dozens of talks across the country during the bicentennial celebration of the Constitution, and in the 1980s Novus Ordo Seclorum was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 1987, the...

Forrest McDonald, a presidential and constitutional scholar who challenged liberal shibboleths about early American history and lionized the founding fathers as uniquely intellectual, died on Tuesday in Tuscaloosa, Ala. He was 89. The cause was heart failure, his daughter Marcy McDonald said. As a Pulitzer Prize finalist in history and a professor at the University of Alabama, Dr. McDonald declared himself an ideological conservative and an opponent of intrusive government. (“I’d move the winter capital to North Dakota and outlaw air-conditioning in the District of Columbia,” he once said.) But he refused to be pigeonholed either as a libertarian or,...

(Note: You the one calling the shots. Which side? British? American? Choose whatever you want--or both! You can be the President or the Prime Minister, or his closest advisor. It's up to you.)=================================== Forrest McDonald writes: "In April of 1806, after Congress had adjourned but before Jefferson headed homeward for Monticello, a three-ship British squadron was patrolling the American coast off New York, searching merchantmen for contraband. "One of the British men-of-war, H.M.S. Leander, fired a warning shot across the bows of a merchant ship, that being the conventional way of announcing to the merchant vessel that he was to...

What Conservatives BelieveConservatism is not an ideology or a program-its programmatic content varies with place and time - but a set of values and an attitude toward changes in the established social order. Its opposite is not any particular dogmatic secular religion - such as communism or socialism - but dogmatic secular religion itself. Peter Viereck once defined conservatism as "the political secularization of the doctrine of original sin." Eric Voegelin defined its opposite as the political secularization of the heresy of gnosticism. Edmund Burke distinguished between "abstraction," or a priori reasoning divorced from or contrary to history and experience,...

IN a historical profession that is scornful of what it calls dead white males, Joseph J. Ellis has emerged as an eloquent champion and brilliant practitioner of the old-fashioned art of biography. He concentrates mainly upon the founders of the American republic, and while those who have particular favorites among the founders may cavil at his interpretations, Ellis has a gift for getting inside the skins of his subjects and showing what made them tick. Now he has taken on the greatest and most enigmatic founder. To describe George Washington as enigmatic may strike some as strange, for every young...

Forrest McDonald strikes another blow against unthinking leftist historians. Arguably the most influential work of American history is Charles A. Beard's "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States," published in 1913. Beard's thesis--that our country was born of base economic self-interest and not idealism--became Holy Writ for many historians and social thinkers, launching a quasi-Marxist critique of the entire American project that persists, in certain corners of the academy, to this day. If the critique has lost its force--and, luckily, it has--much of the credit belongs to Forrest McDonald, the historian who first took on Beard's analysis....

President Reagan was arriving back in Washington fresh from his summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, when Forrest McDonald saw him in October 1986. “He was fresh off of the plane and gave a speech to the press. There might have been 400 people there," McDonald remembers. The speech was about the summit, which had ended shortly before Reagan departed on Air Force One. Because of its content and the timing of the speech, it had to have been written on the plane. McDonald obtained a copy and followed it as Reagan spoke. “He never looked once at a...

Description: Forrest McDonald is Distinguished University Research Professor emeritus at the University of Alabama. His new book, "Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir," recounts the story of his life and his career as a professor, historian, and author. Mr. McDonald's previous books are "Let There Be Light: The Electric Utility Industry in Wisconsin, 1881-1955" (American History Research Center, 1957), "We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution" (University of Chicago Press, 1958), "Insull" (University of Chicago Press, 1962), "E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the American Republic, 1776-1790" (Houghton Mifflin, 1965), "The Torch Is Passed: The United States in...

For many, meeting the president of the United States would be an intimidating affair. Forrest McDonald, however, approached George W. Bush with nary a shiver. “I walked up, pointed my finger at him and said, 'I know you, you’re the president of the United States,’ " McDonald said. To which George W. Bush replied, “Oh, you’re the famous historian." Which he certainly is. McDonald, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Alabama, is one of America’s most noted scholars on the Constitution and the founding fathers. And on Dec. 11, he attended a holiday dinner at the White...