Before you watch the video below you must remember the significance of its venue.
The deliberations of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were held in strict secrecy. Consequently, anxious citizens gathered outside Independence Hall in order to learn what had been produced behind closed doors. The answer was provided immediately.
A Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
…. “if you can keep it”
Now watch this video from Independence Hall:
UNBELIEVABLE !…. or is it?
Monday, Sept. 17, 1787, was the final day of the convention. For four months, the delegates had been locked in an epic battle over whether our fledgling nation should have a strong federal government.
Sound familiar?
They awoke that morning with bitter feelings on both sides and the fate of the nation, literally, in their hands. Things did not look good. Edmund Randolph of Virginia began the day by predicting that nine of the 13 states would fail to ratify the plan “and confusion must ensue.”
He had not counted on Mr. Franklin.
Just before the voting began, the frail 81-year-old delegate told the assembly he had something to say. Too weak to deliver the speech himself, he asked fellow Pennsylvanian James Wilson to read it for him.
It could have been written last week.
Here are excerpts:
“Mr. President, I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions — even on important subjects — which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.
“The older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men, indeed as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth — and that, wherever others differ from them, it is so far error.
“When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests and their selfish views. From such an assembly, can a perfect production be expected?
“Thus I consent, sir, to this constitution. The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good.
“If every one of us, in returning to our constituents, were to report the objections he has had to it and endeavor to gain partisans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received — and thereby lose all the salutary effects and great advantages.
“Much of the strength and efficiency of any government in procuring and securing happiness to the people depends on the general opinion of the goodness of the government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its governors. I hope, therefore, that we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this constitution.
“On the whole, sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it would, with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility — and to make manifest our unanimity.”
Franklin looked at an image of the sun painted on the back of convention President George Washington’s chair.
Over the last four months, he said, he had often looked at that sun and wondered whether it was rising or setting. “Now, at length, I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun,” Franklin said.
Upon Ben Franklin’s exit, Mrs. Powel asked:
“What have you given us?”
Benjamin Franklin replied:
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
How long the American sun will continue to rise might depend on whether defiance or cooperation is seen as the best symbol of an enduring Republic.
• Virginia’s Edmund Randolph participated in the 1787 convention. Demonstrating a clear grasp of democracy’s inherent dangers, he reminded his colleagues during the early weeks of the Constitutional Convention that the purpose for which they had gathered was “to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy….”
• John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, championed the new Constitution in his state precisely because it would not create a democracy. “Democracy never lasts long,” he noted. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.” He insisted, “There was never a democracy that ‘did not commit suicide.'”
• New York’s Alexander Hamilton, in a June 21, 1788 speech urging ratification of the Constitution in his state, thundered: “It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” Earlier, at the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton stated: “We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.”
• James Madison, who is rightly known as the “Father of the Constitution,” wrote in The Federalist, No. 10: “… democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths.” The Federalist Papers, recall, were written during the time of the ratification debate to encourage the citizens of New York to support the new Constitution.
• George Washington, who had presided over the Constitutional Convention and later accepted the honor of being chosen as the first President of the United States under its new Constitution, indicated during his inaugural address on April 30, 1789, that he would dedicate himself to “the preservation … of the republican model of government.”
• Fisher Ames served in the U.S. Congress during the eight years of George Washington’s presidency. A prominent member of the Massachusetts convention that ratified the Constitution for that state, he termed democracy “a government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices and ambitions of their leaders.”
On another occasion, he labeled democracy’s majority rule one of “the intermediate stages towards … tyranny.” He later opined: “Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes.” And in an essay entitled The Mire of Democracy, he wrote that the framers of the Constitution “intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.”
In light of the Founders’ view on the subject of republics and democracies, it is not surprising that the Constitution does not contain the word “democracy,” but does mandate:
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government.”
Sources and Reference:
- https://teachingamericanhistory.org/static/convention/delegates/franklin.html
- https://grassrootsne.com/a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it/
- https://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.ssf/2011/08/lessons_from_franklin_difficul.html
- https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/7631-a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it