Beard's book is simply a proto-communist critique of the US government (in the form of the Realty vs the Personalty). Most of this book simply attempt to assert

Beard's book is simply a proto-communist critique of the US government (in the form of the Realty vs the Personalty). Most of this book simply attempt to assert malice where other explanations are plentiful. For example, he asserts that the 3 branches were intended to make the country less of a democracy. Yes, the goal was a republic instead of a democracy because (as spelled out in the Federalist papers) pure democracies always wind up persecuting minorities (2 wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for dinner) and all historical democracies up to that point fell apart rather quickly. Limiting the power of any one person or cabal was of prime importance. Beard rejects all these reasons as essentially true, but made up excuses (though history is not on his side). Instead, he claims it was to protect them from being overthrown by the masses. He asserts that the constitution was an economic document. Of course this is true. It was trying to convince 13 countries to become one, unified country. It tried to guarantee it wouldn't interfere with things in the Bill of Rights. Once the constitution has established that it can't butt into people's moral business, all that is left is economics. They set down rules to keep one state from oppressing another, rules for foreign commerce, and left internal issues to the states. Beard doesn't say how the rules could be better, he just asserts that because most of the writers had money, they must have had nefarious reasons for establishing those rules. Here's another example. The constitution says the US should pay it's debts. Beard asserts this is because Washington loaned money and wanted it back. Sure, this could be true, but it is also true that small, new countries guaranteeing to pay back money to lenders is paramount to securing loans in the first place. Realty were his creation that was anyone without large amounts of liquid assets (this included land owners). Personalty were people with liquid assets and manufacturing power. He claims the realty were entirely suppressed by the personalty during the constitution's creation. He doesn't provide much hard evidence aside from very generic things like he thinks it was hard to collect farmer's votes or opinion pieces in various newspapers that were anti-federalist. The federalists asserted that if the states didn't unite, they would slowly devolve into a bunch of little, squabbling countries that would be played against each other or outright conquered by the European powers. He has no answer. He claimed repression of the realty, but many of the county's most famous people rose from nothing. In fact, the upward mobility of the US has exceeded every other country since it's inception. This contradicts his claim, yet he has no answer. I would go so far as to say that he fails to justify any of his smears and that history both before and after 1913 has not been on his side.