moment arose in which statesmen despaired that the new order inaugurated by these
system transforming events--the Constitution, the Civil War, and World War II--was
passing from their grasp; we are going back, they said, to the 1780s, to the 1850s, to the
1930s. Despite these challenges, the lineaments of the new order turn out to have an
enduring power, a Lazarus-like tendency to defy the obituaries that are pronounced upon
them.
In certain salient ways, indeed, each system has an “epic unity,” as Lord Acton
described the period from the making of the federal constitution “to the election of Mr.
Davis in 1861.” For the Philadelphian system, that epic unity consisted, as Acton
emphasized, of a seventy-year war between the opposing and inconsistent principles of
centralization and states’ rights, neither of which could prevail.
For the Appomattox
system, it consisted of the formulas of political isolation, the protective tariff, and the
Monroe Doctrine, each transformed in significance by the great power status and
nationalistic sentiments that arose from the Civil War, and then brought low by the world
crisis of the 1930s. For the Washington system, it consisted of the tension between
imperialism and internationalism as the expression of America’s role as world leader, its
global ascendancy having been established by its victory in the Second World War.
None of these three governing systems escaped criticism with regard to their
legitimacy, but each had a strong claim to fame. For broad masses of men and women,
they summoned conviction, inspired loyalty and allegiance, touched the inner springs of
feeling and devotion.
None, however, was without a tragic dimension. The convincing and dominant
formulas of constitutionalism and diplomacy with which they began became more
51
Lord Acton, "Political Causes of the American Revolution," Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of
History, William H. McNeill, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 43-44.
39
Convention