Charles L. Mee, Jr.: The Genius of the People. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, September 30, 1987.
To take the profuse, complex details of past events and build a readable narrative with them: popular history is easy to do, hard to do well. Prey to partisanship and pedantry of all kinds, the 1787 Constitutional Convention is no exception. Charles L. Mee, Jr. has a knack for this kind of writing, as he shows here. If accompanied with a few caveats, his book should make a timely gift for the non-scholar (or young student) who wants to know something about what this Bicentennial-of-the-Constitution stuff is all about.
“The genius of the people” alludes to an assertion of Publius in The Federalist: that only the republican form of government fits “the genius”—that is, the character and situation—”of the American people.” By establishing that form, the United States Constitution reflects our people but is not simply a product of them. Publius does not suggest that we are geniuses in the romantic sense of the word prevalent today; he presupposes decent virtues and ordinary intelligence, both exercised in liberty. But the framing of the Constitution did require exceptional intelligence and virtue of a certain kind, best summarized in the word ‘prudence.’
Mee more or less understands this. He rejects the once-fashionable contention of reductionist historians, that the Framers merely played for personal and regional economic advantage. Their motives, complicated and various, do not fit any simple pattern. There was James Madison, concerned with balancing central and local governments, uniform national laws with liberty. There was George Washington, convinced that the new country’s economic well-being and military strength depended upon a strong central government. There was Benjamin Franklin, optimistic, more ‘democratic’ than Washington, less troubled by such disorders as Shay’s Rebellion. There was George Mason, advocate of strong local government, a detester of politics, distrustful of politicians, who therefore determined to keep the federal government modestly empowered. Mee writes vivid, telling political character sketches of these and the other principal Framers that form the best section of the book.
Mee remarks one extraordinary similarity among these diverse, quarrelsome men. They were gentlemen, in the old way. All agreed not to report any of the Convention’s secret proceedings to the public. Except for the garrulous Franklin, who gossiped among friends, none did—proof that the Framers held prudence and honor above popularity and transient advantage. “The newspapers knew nothing,” and as a result, serious candid deliberations could occur, and did.
Virginia’s delegation put the serous set of proposals before the Convention. Written by Madison, the Virginia Plan called for a strong national government dominated by the large states. Mee recounts Madison’s argument in defense of enlarging the sphere of government: that a federal republic extending over a large territory and substantial population will make it harder for any one faction to dominate the others, thereby controlling the worst effects of faction. But he gives Madison an egalitarian twist, summarizing his claim to be, “The answer to the problems of democracy was more democracy.” This seriously distorts the argument of the tenth Federalist, which calls not for more democracy, more direct popular rule, but a more extensive republic, or representative government. Mees has replaced Madison’s argument with a phrase from the twentieth-century egalitarian philosopher John Dewey, a ‘progressive’ who regarded the United States Constitution as inadequate to the needs of modern life, and who sought to combine increased direct democracy with a bureaucratic welfare state. Madison wanted not “more” democracy but a republic capable of restraining the typical excesses of democracy.
The local-power or states-rights men were not to be overawed by the Virginia gentry. Mee narrates the debate, and much of what one can know or guess about the bargaining after hours, with accuracy and verve. “Thoroughly practiced in political realism,” the Framers were “neither naïve nor cynical”; the centralist and localist factions “could not be neatly divided along lines of wealth or class.” These were political men, not economic ones. Their final compromises—basing the House of Representatives on population, the Senate on equal representation of the states—demonstrated this prudence. Madison opposed the compromise (which Franklin wrote) making him “the Father of the Constitution” in a strict and traditional sense: initiating, contributing significantly to its genetic makeup, and helping to ensure its care, but not to be credited with the whole baby.
The book should be read with a few caveats. Mee has a weakness for polemical jabs directly more at the political situation of 1987 than 1787. Thus we learn of his opposition to “secret wars” and of his enthusiasm for gun control. He sometimes lets his sentiments outrun his evidence, as when claiming that Madison’s Senate was for the rich, his House of Representatives for the middle class, and that “the poor would have to hope, as always, that government pledged to justice did not mean to risk the foundation of justice by restricting it to the few.” But in 1787, 1987, and every year in between, the middle class and not the poor has comprised the majority of Americans; if the House is the seat of the middle class, then government has never been restricted to the few.
More seriously, Mee claims that the great defense of the new Constitution, The Federalist, “promotes a conception of the Constitution that is… more aristocratic than the consensus of those who actually wrote the document.” However, he almost immediately concedes that The Federalist “gave partisans of the Constitution the best arguments they could use in favor of the new plan.” That being the case, then the more “aristocratic” conception must be superior to the democratic one. The most intelligent critique of interpretations of the Constitution in accordance with the Framers’ “original intent” would be that the document is better than the intent.
Instead, Mee trots out a much worse, though more common, argument. Because the “Great Compromise” between large and small states was a compromise, he denies that any original intention can be found in the Constitution at all. This of course makes no sense. If two people argue and reach a genuine compromise, each comes away with a new, shared intention. The debate over original intent involves some complex issues, and cannot be so simply dismissed as ‘progressive’ partisans of “judicial activism” would like to do.
The Genius of the People nonetheless serves the intention of its author, who provides a readable account of the single most important event in the course of events in America. Scholars will learn nothing from the book, but they are not its audience. Non-scholars can do worse than to read a book of this sort, especially if they read with that typically American skeptic’s eye.
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