Plain, Honest Men: The Making Of The American Constitution (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
Hey, I’ve got a book for you. The next time Michael I-Couldn’t-Deceive-You Moore or Al Frankensenseless tells you the Founding Fathers were a bunch of Racist White Guys, you can throw this book at them. (Unless you have the Kindle version. Don’t throw your Kindle at Sen. Frankensenseless or he’ll steal it and hire a lawyer to somehow prove that it’s his along with 156 other Kindles. Then he’ll say something that’s not funny.)I read this book about a year ago and now I roll my eyes every time I hear People of Prominence say that the Constitution is an old, tired, decrepit, worn-out piece of parchment that should be euthanized along with the Tea Party and Strom Thurmond and all the jokes they used to tell in Vaudeville. Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men is a highly engaging book that looks at the Men and their Motives at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. These guys weren’t what the Lefties and the hirsute Mr. Stephanuppagus claim them to be on State-Sanctioned National TV (As an aside, when I see folly such as that, I think, My Word! You mean when I tell a Black Man that I believe in Debate in the Spirit of the Founding Fathers, said Black Man thinks I’m condoning a class of Dead Racists?)!At some point, the four-month, un-catered extended Convention was deadlocked by a contingency of delegates from South Carolina. To break the deadlock, a fellow by the name of Roger Sherman offered what would soon be known as the Connecticut Compromise starring Roger Sherman. It was a provision to appease the smaller states, as they feared getting swallowed up like tiny Lichtenstein during one of Hitler’s midnight cravings for blue cheese. Property rights were very important to these folks (as they should be to us folks today), and the taxation and apportionment clauses focused on populations, not state land mass, per se. It seems either silly or complicated, but if you read the book, you’ll see how close to dis-Union the country came over this banal matter, and you’ll also realize that per the way the Sharper Knives in the Drawer arranged it, Slavery, though still an American institution, could only hang by a thread.Did any of you know that Ben Franklin was an active Abolitionist? And no, that doesn’t mean he wanted to abolish competitor Almanack-writers, it means he ACTIVELY CALLED FOR THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY, so much so that he went to the County Clerk’s Office and registered the name of his Dot-Org. There was another guy, by the name of Gouverneur Morris (The guy who first talked of “Plain, Honest Men”), from New York, who, when he wasn’t teasing the ladies with his false leg, was ACTIVELY CALLING FOR THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY. The entire Virginia contingency, you know—Virginia—where there were plantations and such, were not as physically active as Morris or Franklin, but their delegation was comprised of cerebral philosophers and country lawyers and NARY A ONE OF THEM CONSIDERED SLAVERY A VIABLE OR DECENT INSTITUTION.FOX News tele-journalist Chris Wallace apologized to Michele Bachmann for his dopey line of questioning to the Congresswoman and Presidential candidate from Minnesota during a 2011 campaign run. I think George Stephanuppagus owes me and about every US History Teacher in the Land an apology for such dopey and naïve assumptions about our Founding Fathers. Some unnamed opportunist started these Myths decades ago. The Drafting of the Constitution may not have been Cakes and Ale for All, but the perpetrated and perpetuated Myths should never linger as fobs of negativity in the American Psyche in perpetuity. This the story of about 40 men gathered together in a stuffy room, returning daily for months, to discuss drafting a legal document. It would be only too easy to make it terribly dry and boring. Instead it has become a lively book with in places a touch of humor, written in a crisp, clear style.The author chose to devote most time and pages to the topics that were controversial even at the time: The nature of the US government, the balance of power between the small and large states, the process of electing the president, and above all the issue of slavery, which was handled by the creators of the constitution with baffling hypocrisy. Short biographic sketches of most of the people in this drama, in so far as they help to explain why they acted as they did, further enliven the story. This has become more the story of a group of people than the story of a document, however important that document might be."Plain, Honest Men" contains enough material to prove that some of the framers of the US constitution were not so plain, and a few were less than entirely honest. The resulting document was only reluctantly embraced by many of those who had worked on it, often more because this was the best that they could get than because they were pleased by it. That process was rich in irony, considering how influential the US Constitution has been, not just on the state that it created but also on the authors of liberal constitutions all over the world, or even those of constitutional monarchies...The book mostly avoids the contemporary debate on the interpretation of the constitution, resigning itself to observe that the interpretation of these words was already controversial even while they were written.
What do You think about Plain, Honest Men: The Making Of The American Constitution (2009)?
See the interview on The Daily Show, read the book. A nice piece on the writing of the constitution.
—Fadhil91s
Spectacular, great narrative, debunks a lot of supposedly known "facts" about the founding fathers.
—earendil28
Extremely readable account of the most important summer in U.S. history.
—xo_b3ll3_ox
