History worth looking at...........

 

 Franklin’s central point was that everyone needed to adjust their expectations, that neither political perfection nor moral purity was ever in the cards at the Constitutional Convention.

-Joseph Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

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the great conciliator................

 

"When one has so many different people with different opinions to deal with in a new affair," he explained to his friend Cadwallader Colden, "one is obliged sometimes to give up some smaller points in order to obtain greater."  It was a sentiment he would express in similar words when he became the great conciliator at the Constitutional Convention thirty-three years later.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

the unending tug of war..............

 

From the outset, the convention reflected a pointed truce in the unending tug of war between those who believed in the necessity of a functioning union and those who feared the encroaching despotism of a national government and clung to states' rights; between fervent slaveholders and ardent abolitionists; between those who worried that small states would be smothered by the political juggernaut of the big states and those who worried about the tyranny of the minority; and between radicals who wanted a clear repudiation of the past and traditionalists who wanted only to tinker at the margins.  The reality was that after more than five generations of laying down roots in America, the exigencies of life had only sharpened the old insistence upon demands for personal liberty and equality.  Now the Americans found themselves arguing both for the historic and chartered rights they had once enjoyed as Englishmen, and for the timeless and universal rights of man.

      It was complicated, it was messy, and somehow everything came together.  Politicians all, the delegates compromised repeatedly.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800

compromise........................

 Compromise is another word that carries shades of weakness, vacillation, betrayal of ideals, surrender of moral principles.  In the old culture, when virginity was a virtue, one referred to a woman's being "compromised."  The work is generally regarded as ethically unsavory and ugly. . . .

     A free and open society is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises—which then become the start for the continuation of conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum.  Control of power is based on compromise in our Congress and among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.  A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian.  If I had to define a free and open society in one word, the word would be "compromise."

-Saul D. Alinsky

     

Reagan......................................

 After years of unrest through Vietnam, Watergate, recession, and the Iran hostage crisis, Reagan reversed a sense of national decline and replaced it with a renewed confidence.  He was devoted to the new conservative catechism of lower taxes, a strong military, and anti-communism, but not so wedded to the details that it stopped him from reaching across the aisle to achieve many of his priorities with bipartisan support.  To Reagan, compromise was acceptable and course corrections necessary at times.  He did not practice the politics of personal destruction; he fought hard but treated his opponents with dignity and respect.

-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser,  The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

About the Constitution.......................

     The makers of the Constitution earned in a manner the full praise that has ever since been bestowed on them.  But they did not, as it has often been suggested they did, create a sort of archetype and pattern for all governments that may hereafter partake of a federal character.  Nor has the curious machine which they devised—the balanced opposition between two legislative chambers, between the whole Legislature and the independent executive power of the President, between the governing power of the moment and the permanent expression of the people's will embodied in certain almost unalterable laws—worked conspicuously better than other political constitutions.  The American Constitution owes its particularities partly to the form which the State governments had naturally taken, and partly to sheer misunderstanding of the British Constitution, but much more to the want at the time of any strong sense of national unity and to the existence of a good deal of dislike to all governments whatsoever.  The sufficient merit of its founders was of patient and skillful diplomatists, who, undeterred by difficulties, found out the most satisfactory settlement that had a chance of being accepted by the States.

-Lord Charnwood,  Abraham Lincoln:  A Complete Biography

On matters of principle...............

...........................................and the refusal to compromise.

On politicians...............

     Clay's willingness to abandon protection caused some men to question his motives and his commitment to principle.  But the Kentuckian was never rigid in his ideological thinking.  Like any intelligent politician, he understood that politics is not about ideological purity or moral self-righteousness.  It is about governing, and if a politician cannot compromise, he cannot govern effectively.  And Henry Clay know that only a true compromise - one in which both sides sacrifice something to achieve a greater benefit - could will over the nullifiers and draw them back from a determined course of self-destruction.
     In presenting his compromise, Clay no doubt recognized that if he spared the nation the agony of bloodshed, he would reclaim his shattered image as a party leader.  He would be hailed as a great statesman, nimble-witted enough to find the solution to resolve the conflicting sectional interests that threatened the nation.  As an additional benefit, the abandonment of protection would surely swell his support in the South, where he desperately needed it.  No doubt Clay's motives in deciding to lend his hand to the resolution of this crisis grew partly out of his pride and political ambition as well as his commitment to the Union and its republican ideals.

-Robert V. Remini,  Henry Clay:  Statesman for the Union

Here is an interesting thought for today.......

"We believe, and I think properly, that when the men who met in 1787 to make our Constitution they made the best political document ever made; but, remember, they did so very largely because they were great compromisers."
-Judge Learned Hand