July 16 is an American anniversary paradox. Its event escaped popular memory long ago, and yet its subject is fodder for popular debate with each ensuing generation.
That was the date, during the steamy summer of 1787 in the City of Brotherly Love, when Constitutional Convention delegates approved the Great Compromise, which historians say saved and solidified the shaky union of states.
This followed, appropriately, the Great Debate over a central dispute that had persisted since George Washington's gavel first dropped. Indeed, it had been a point of contention during the drafting of the Articles of Confederation, and arrived in Philadelphia in full vigor with the delegates.
Small states' fear of large states' domination and tyranny was woven into the United States' DNA from birth. Even 234 years after the framers fashioned a time-proven solution, the same old argument gets revived regularly.
In instances like this history is not only especially instructive, but also invaluable in perspective.
As travelers noted at the time, the United States at the time of the convention differed drastically and dramatically from its European counterparts.
America had no true metropolises--New York City housed a scant 33,000 inhabitants, compared to London's population approaching 1 million or Paris' 650,000 souls--and thus none of the metropolitan maladies that afflicted European cities.
There was also no true aristocracy of European style, in which superiority/inferiority was embedded in the classes, and certainly not the gaping wealth and caste chasms of the Old Country. Visitors from across the sea were shocked at what they perceived as universal prosperity ("easy circumstances" as more than one described the American condition) in the fledgling United States. They saw nothing on this continent that compared with the plights of the poor in places like London, or the teeming beggars on the avenues of Paris.
English and French visitors were surprised, to the point of incomprehensibility, at Americans' total lack of acquaintance and understanding about landed lords, and expected loyalty of oppressed peasants under their charge and protection. Americans couldn't fathom the idea of fealty to "their betters" or envision any sort of "spirit of servility" to a class above themselves.
"[Americans] pass their lives without any regard to the smiles or frowns of men in power," one British traveler noted. A French observer was awestruck to see a U.S. congressman riding in a stage coach alongside a laborer who had voted for him, both in avid discussion.
Foreign travelers of that time limited their analysis to comparing white Americans with white Europeans, of course. While most agreed slavery was an evil blot on the young nation, it was a problem of vast proportions for which they had no answer.
Amid this America of general equality, free from feudal tradition but fearful of centralized government power and overreach, state representation in Congress was a debate of deal-breaking dimensions during the convention.
Big-state bullying was a constant small-state worry. Some large-state spokesmen, voicing disdain that the small states should be so afraid, tried to downplay such fears. But in the end, all delegates realized that the senatorial ratio of representation was the determinant of small states' powerlessness.
The July 16 compromise vote for equal representation in the upper chamber sealed the deal and soothed suspicions. Senate equality not only balanced power in the legislature, but also shielded small states from majority tyranny in the executive branch through the Electoral College.
Two centuries later, far-left voices disdainfully claim small-state constitutional protections like that to be unfounded and now unnecessary. But whatever the potential for large-state domination was back then, it has exponentially expanded in modern times. The population of the largest state (Pennsylvania) at the first census in 1790 was only 12 times that of the smallest (New Jersey).
Today, California's population is 70 times that of Wyoming's, and its state budget ($263 billion in 2021) dwarfs the Cowboy State version ($8 billion). Large states have never possessed the crushing potential for tyranny of the majority among states more than now, which is why small states need protection more than ever.
As seen with civil rights, the conventional wisdom hasn't been to loosen protections over time against majority threats, but rather to bolster them. Just as Blacks didn't trust white promises of racial equality, and insist still today on continuing commitments carrying the weight of law, small states prudently distrusted their larger counterparts' oral assurances.
Statesmen and scholars credit the Great Compromise as critically essential to the forging of our union into a stable and enduring constitutional republic. Like all good compromises, delegates on both sides had to accept some dilution of their demands. Standing firm on selective personal principle alone would have wrecked the convention. A spirit of accommodation made it miraculous.
Armchair critics of the Electoral College should remember that combining historical illiteracy with the luxury of wishful hindsight can produce dangerously flawed thinking. Those today who would undo protections that long ago established and have perennially preserved the liberty they enjoy now probably deserve to lose it.
Let's hope, for our freedom's sake, that bandwagon doesn't gain steam.
Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.