(HOST) As the political season picks up steam, commentator Vic Henningsen looks for guidance in a handbook over two hundred years old.
(Henningsen) Back in 1787, Americans were debating overthrowing their government. Most Americans liked the Articles of Confederation – an arrangement that enshrined local control and largely left them alone. But a significant minority worried about the staying power of a government that couldn’t tax, regulate commerce, or defend its citizens. This group engineered the Constitutional Convention and proposed an entirely new arrangement: one in which powers formerly reserved to the states were consolidated in a new and potentially powerful central government.
The Constitutional Convention challenged Americans to change a government most liked, by requiring states to reduce their own powers. That’s what ratification was about. Most of us remember highlights of the Constitutional Convention – few recall the drama played out in state ratification debates.
Those debates occurred in formal conventions, in public meetings, taverns, churches, homes and, extensively, in newspapers. The most famous example remains The Federalist Papers, a series of eighty-five essays published between October 1787 and May 1788.
Written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, the Federalist Papers analyzed how power was exercised in the America of the 1780s. They illustrated the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation; explained how the proposed new government might work; and sought to demonstrate that power and liberty could co-exist. The last point was a tough sell to a skeptical American public, whose recent history taught that centralized power was always abusive.
Historians say the Federalist essays are the best articulation of American political theory ever written. We forget, however, that they were campaign documents, designed to promote ratification in New York State, where the contest was particularly close – the margin of victory was only three votes.
We also forget they were written on deadline by extremely busy men. Hamilton, in particular, might be called America’s first multi-tasker: he wrote 60% of them, twice producing five in a single week, while carrying on a busy law practice and organizing support for ratification at the New York convention. These elegant essays were largely first drafts that went straight from pen to press.
Since then The Federalist Papers have become tremendously influential in debates over government powers. The Supreme Court, for example, has cited The Federalist over 600 times in its decisions – more citations than for any other source except the Constitution itself.
That’s because their central point still matters. The question of how power and liberty can co-exist lay at the heart of the debate in 1787. It remains there today in this era of the Patriot Act and the return of an imperial Presidency. Those who seek to understand the current debate might return to the original primer on how American government was supposed to work. Old as it is, The Federalist is still the best.
Vic Henningsen is a teacher and historian.