The Genius of America by Eric Lane Page A

of compromise at the moment of creation. For it isn’t just what they wrote that mattered, as important as the document has become to us. It is how they worked and argued and revised and, amazingly, produced a Constitution “approaching so near to perfection,” in Benjamin Franklin’s subtle description, despite the imperfections, narrow interests, selfish motives, prejudices and outright errors of each individual delegate. Out of many voices came one nation. It is that spirit we need to recover.
    T HE R IGHT M AN AT THE R IGHT M OMENT
    James Madison was the right man at the right moment. It is a very lucky thing for America that he was there on May 25, 1787, when convened in Philadelphia for the first session of what is now known to us as the Constitutional Convention. America was in crisis. Americans had won their liberty from Great Britain, but they had failed to establish a successful self-governing country. Their utopian notion in 1776—that all they needed was simple government, free of England and relying on the public virtue of the people—had failed.
    Instead, the country was riven by factions, each intending to impose its interests on others. Self-interest, not public virtue, dominated public conduct. The pursuit of happiness had become the pursuit of individual and group interests and not those of the community or nation. Neither the national government nor the state governments were strong enough to create order out of the chaos these competing groups created.
    The fear that their country was failing produced in the framers a new attitude that sounded very much like humility. Take, for example, Alexander Hamilton, who has rarely been thought of as a humble man. “Is it now time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age,” Hamilton said of the failed promise of simple government resting on faith in public virtue, “and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?” Many delegates to the convention held this new attitude. They all believed Americans had been given exceptional opportunity. Perhaps they even had exceptional ambitions for themselves and their new nation. But, the framers had come to realize, as individuals in a political or civic setting, Americans were not actually exceptional in their ability to rise above their own interests. Accepting this reality, that we are just as flawed and self-motivated as “the other inhabitants of the globe,” made all sorts of compromises and agreements possible.
    In fact, the convention itself would become a first test of their new thinking about democracy. Almost all the delegates agreed on the need for a stronger national government. But what kind of government? On this question they had, Franklin wrote, “ideas so different, . . . prejudices so strong and so various, and . . . particular interests, independent of the general.” Could men with such varied ideas, prejudices and interests come together, fight for their views, and then accept the outcome of the process?
    In answering yes to this question, the framers created a new definition of public virtue . Before, public virtue had meant setting aside a self-interest to accept a general public interest. Now it assumed that Americans would pursue their self-interest within the halls of government. But if their voices were meaningfully heard, they would respect for the greater good decisions even when adverse to their views. Participation, compromise and respect for process would become the new measures of public good. Good decisions, wrote James Wilson, would require “mutual concessions and sacrifices . . . mutual forbearance and conciliation.”
    The delegates viewed the convention as the last chance to rescue the American experiment. Its task, wrote Madison, was “to secure the public