August 09, 1972
It is an affection of the ignorant and the lazy to reject history as irrelevant mythology a boring repository of useless information that has no bearing on the problems of today. What a pity! Those who ignore history are forced is live it again. How tragic that we commit the same failures over and over again. The lessons of yesterday are reliable guides to today's problems. We suffer the outrages of "study days' by teachers, and "blue flu" by the police; and "wildcat" strikes by unions,-and "non violent demonstrations" by racists, and "teach ins" by students, and "moratorium" by peaceniks. The courts are defied. The laws are defied. The peace officers are defied. All in the name of conscience. Each day brings a new example of one-sided power exerted for a minority interest. And why not? We hurry to reward oafishness with all they ask and more. Only jerks, it seems, obey the law and pay taxes so others can grind them into oblivion. From an historical perspective, anarchy is not so many steps away. The break down in republican government - and the drift to special-interest politics - distresses me because it is so detrimental to freedom. In theory, our democratically chosen leaders govern by the consent of the governed. But, today, a large part of our citizenry refuses to be governed. In place of our traditional government of laws we are moving to a government of ultimatums, of non-negotiable demands of "burn baby, burn." Churches encourage us to ignore the draft laws and court orders upholding property "even at the risk of national interest." The system of law that holds the best promise of solution to our problems - no, the ONLY promise - is the representative form of government outlier- by Our Founding Fathers but now increasingly decredited. If you doubt it, then you must read the new book by Professor John A. Garraty, "Interpreting American History: Conversations with Historians," (MacMillan Company). He asked Henry Steele Commager, professor of history at Amherst College, to comment about the influence of evolutionary crisis on the development of American nationalism. Commager's answer reminds us of the potential of republican government to achieve progress. "What is fascinating is that Americans developed the resourcefulness and wisdom to solve the problem of organizing a nation in the midst of war and crisis - one of the greatest achievements of modern political theory," said Commager. "The Americans of the Revolutionary generations proved themselves the most creative statesmen in modern history, perhaps in all history. They established institutions that have had a more lasting influence than any other. "We've been living on that capital ever since. All our political and constitutional -institutions were created in the eighteenth century. Of these, perhaps most important was federalism, a new form of nationalism and the only form that could possibly have worked. "The essential element of federalism is a separation of powers between local and general governments, which the British had pretty well effected (without realizing it). "The quintessential element the Americans worked out was the sanctions behind federalism," said Commager. "What happens when the constituent parts of a federal system don't abide by the agreement? What had always been done from the beginning of time was to march an army into the offending region, seize a weapon and kill somebody. This was the original plan of the Federal (Constitutional) Convention; Edmund Randolph's plan gave the national government the power to coerce the states. "But gradually it became clear that to resort to force was to decree perpetual civil war. So the founders, as one of them put it, 'substituted the benign magistracy of the law for the awful sanctions of the sword.' Commager said, "They worked out sanctions that were enormously ingenious. The first was dual citizenship. Every American was a citizen of the state and of the nation. Secondly, the federal government was made to operate through law, on each individual citizen, not through force, on the States. "If the citizens of Pennsylvania do not obey a federal law, you don't declare war on Pennsylvania, you arrest the people who are breaking the law and try them. "Now this is the system Americans discovered: dual citizenship and a government that could operate directly on the citizens through the courts. For the first time in history, a system was created that depended for its effective operation on the integrity, wisdom and effectiveness of the courts. "More than any other government in history," said Commager, "ours is a government of laws. Almost every issue of state versus nation has been fought in the courts." |
