Miracle at Philadelphia by Catherine Drinker Bowen - Essay Example

Miracle at Philadelphia [Name Of Student] [Name Of Institution] MIRACLE AT PHILADELPHIA Miracle at Philadelphia is Catherine Drinker Bowen's plot version of the Constitutional Convention that was held in 1787, throughout which people from 12 of the 13 recently autonomous American states beat out what will turn out to be the United States Constitution, which is yet in force at present. Bowen’s mechanism comprises of thorough research and detailed and factual account, that includes from the diaries and notes of delegate, together with James Madison, and embraces fashionable newspaper accounts to coat a person visual rendering of the Convention, full with the pressures and oppositions among states that intimidated to tear apart the Convention and possibly even the juvenile country. Bowen spotlights on a very precise piece of American record in her book, compressing virtually five months of roughly incessant meetings into just about a handful of wonderful reading. Any novelist taking on the story of such a significant chronological occurrence as the Constitutional Convention must tackle the mythology and folklore that have come up approximately the occurrence over time. The beginning fathers hold such an eminent place in American times past that it is every so often difficult to visualize them as living, breathing natives. This is what Bowen endeavors to do in her description, and she embraces a number of minute details to fetch the Convention into the daily world well-known to her readers. One of the thematic particulars that Bowen pays attention to is the weather. In almost every episode, she refers to the domineering warmth of the Philadelphia summer. She adds a report of the woolen clothing widespread in the day to coat a bright explanation of uneasiness. An admirer of the economic reforms General Augusto Pinochet had brought about in neighboring Chile during the late 1980s, Vargas Llosa had invited a delegation of Chilean businessmen, including Jose Pitiera, who had held ministerial posts for mining and labor under Pinochet and had reformed Chile's social-security system. Eager to duplicate Chile's economic boom, the Peruvians received Pitiera warmly when he came forward to speak. The first part of his talk--proud words about the triumph of capitalism in his native country--was greeted with frequent applause. But the clapping stopped when he began to talk about how it could happen in Peru. "Be good citizens," he told the Peruvians. "Pay your taxes. Accept the reality that tariffs must drop. Wake up to the fact that the state must no longer protect you" The ruvians sat in stony silence as Pifiera finished and returned to his seat. Pinera's reception tells much about why Vargas Llosa's ideas ended up lost in the labyrinths that mark his novels, and why his campaign ended in failure and betrayal. It shows both how far Latin America has come toward realizing the liberal ideal and how far it has yet to go. Certainly, there have been hopeful signs. Starting in the mid-1980s, Latin American and Caribbean governments, one after another, began to abandon protectionism and other statist economic policies that had been widespread--and ruinous--for decades. Programs that cut state spending, de-controlled prices, privatized state holdings, and redirected economic production away from import substitution and toward competitive exports are now the rule more than the exception throughout Latin America. Even politicians who campaigned against economic liberalization have ended up sponsoring it. During Peru's 1990 presidential race, Alberto Fujimori blasted Vargas Llosa's advocacy of "shock therapy," and Carlos Menem in Argentina ran as a traditional Peronist populist. Once in office, though, both men proceeded to govern from the right, with Fujimori adopting a plan--which became known as "Fuji-shock"--even more austere than the one proposed by Vargas Llosa. Gasoline prices rose 3,000 percent, food prices by 500 percent. Last fall, Menem capped monetary reforms, tax-rate reductions, and the privati-zation of several state companies with a sweeping program of deregulation. Other Latin American leaders made similar adjustments. Jamaica's Michael Manley and Venezuela's Carlos Andres Perez were populists. during their first administrations but turned right after being reelected. In Mexico, the caudillos (strong men) of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) once made themselves national heroes by expropriating Mexico's privately owned resources; President Lazaro Cardenas's 1938 decree nationalizing foreign oil companies was considered by many Mexicans the high point of the Mexican Revolution. Today, by contrast, PRI's President Carlos Salinas wins applause by selling nationalized companies back to private owners. Political developments in Latin America have also looked promising. While in 1976 only four nations--Colombia, Venezuela, Surinam, and Costa Rica--enjoyed elected, civilian governments, today only four do not. Haiti and Cuba are classic right- and left-wing dictatorships; Peru's elected president Fujimori, backed by the military, staged his own autogolpe (self-coup) last April and has since held dictatorial powers; Mexico's PRI remains in control by engineering elections, although it has begun to make good on its promise to clean up the electoral process. Despite these exceptions, most of Latin America gives the appearance of moving in the right direction. The armed forces no longer seek to control their governments, and governments no longer seek to control their economies. On the surface at least, Latin America appears to be caught up in the larger global movement toward the "end of history," the triumph of liberal democracy, rule of law, and free-market prim ciples celebrated by such optimists as Francis Fukuyama. But appearances are deceptive. While dictatorship and statist economic programs have largely vanished from Latin America with this most recent embrace of the liberal ideal, they have been supplanted by forms of government and economic policies that remain far from the realities of a true liberal order. Unfortunately, the discrepancy between appearances and substance is nothing new in this part of the world. Just as many Latin American writers have become known for a style of literature called magical realism, a style blending realism and surreal fantasy, so Latin America's dominant political and economic traditions could be described as magical liberalism--a highly fanciful semblance of the spare, elegant system imagined by a John Locke or a James Madison. It may seem odd to say that liberalism is largely illusory for nations that have long claimed to be liberal constitutional democracies. After all, most Latin American states came to independence un der the banner of liberalism. The debates that took place in the capitals of the new countries in the early 19th century resembled those that took place 50 years before in Philadelphia and Boston. The issues were federalism, checks on executive power, and the rights of citizens; and many Latin American constitutions were almost word-for-word translations of the U.S. Constitution. But the French Revolution and French thinkers--notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau--had a far more decisive effect on Latin American liberalism than did Anglo-American ideas and experiences. The religion, language, and culture of the French were also far more familiar to Latin Americans. Just as important, Latin American revolutions succeeded in large part because of Napoleon's usurpation of the Spanish crown. The flag of the United Provinces of Central America, before that short-lived nation's dissolution in 1838, featured the red cap of the French Revolution, and Mexico's liberal reforms of the 1850s were carried out under the influence of the French. From Rousseau and the French model, latin American liberals inherited a strong statist orientation. While Locke and the Anglo-American tradition emphasized tolerance, civil society, individual rights, and limits on central power, Rousseau (particularly as interpreted by Latin American intellectuals) tended to emphasize the subordination of all social interests to central authority and even, if necessary, to a powerful, visionary leader. Accompanying this centralizing, authoritarian tendency was an equally powerful corporatist impulse. Perpetuating some of the feudal habits of the former Hapsburg Spanish governors, the new Latin nations gave certain groups--the military, the Catholic Church, and wealthy landowners--special responsibilities and rights, from education to a "moderating" role in government. As a political philosophy, Latin American liberalism has weathered most ideological challenges from the Right and the Left. In our century, it has survived the neo-fascist governments of Juan Peron in Argentina and Getulio Vargas in Brazil (whose ideological vogue ended with the defeat of European fascism in World War II) and, more recently, a string of military dictatorships that often preserved the window dressing of liberal constitutionalism while effectively crashing democracy and free enterprise. There has also been the challenge of communism. But though communists took power in Nicaragua and Cuba, and though they created influential parties in most Latin American nations, Marxism-Leninism never posed a serious, hemisphere-wide challenge to the liberal ideal. Today, communists rule in only one nation, and there only by dint of Fidel Castro's will and charisma. Curiously--one might even say magically--the liberal ideal in Latin America seems to endure precisely because of its lack of substance. The fact that liberalism's guiding principles, as encoded in law, have been only feebly enforced has allowed almost any travesty of liberalism to govern in its name. To be sure, liberalism admits a wide range of economic and political arrangements. Liberal nations have different electoral systems and vary in the degree to which their governments feel motivated 'to restrict citizens' rights. Economic liberalism encompasses both John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman; there is room under liberalism for Britain's laissez-faire, Sweden's social democracy, Japan's government-directed industrial policy, and Germany's welfare state. Yet for all its latitude, liberalism is not broad enough to encompass many of the economic and political arrangements that have obtained throughout most of Latin America's modern history, from the earliest . days of independence to the present. Even parties that have called themselves liberal have often represented anything but liberal principles. The Somozas, the dynasty that long dominated Nicaragua, called themselves and their supporters the Nationalist Liberal Party. Argentina's liberals supported the military coup of 1976 and defended the juntas' terrifying record of repression. Colombia's Liberal Party comes closer to reflecting liberal ideals, yet for most of its history it has been a party of the wealthy, resistant to widespread political participation and the uniform application of law. Even more than to the French influence, the weakness of Latin American liberalism can be attributed to social and political conditions that predate the era of independence, bound up with patterns of governance and economics that resulted from the conquest and colonization of this part of the New World by the Spanish and Portuguese. Unlike the English colonizers to the north, the iberian conquerors were more interested in extracting than in creating wealth. Argentine writer Jacobo Timerman overstates the case only slightly when he declares that the "Spanish were really pirates." Latin America's colonizers came bearing notions of centralized authority and hierarchy that reflected the organizational preferences of the Spanish Hapsburg Crown and the conservative Catholic Church. Great class differences resulting from the conquest of Indian civilizations reinforced a social organization of master and slave as well as elite resistance to the idea of universal rights. Central control exercised by colonial seats such as Lima and Santiago de Guatemala inhibited development of a civil society. Corruption further undermined a universal application of law. The corrosiveness of this colonial legacy can be demonstrated by what happened in those few countries that were less burdened by it: Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica. The territories that were to become these nations had the good fortune to be poor and isolated at the time of the Spanish conquest--and to lack the great Indian civilizations that the Spanish could enslave to work on the plantations and in the mines. Chile was the only Spanish colony that operated at a loss every year. Costa Rica, despite its name, had no minerals, was the farthest of all Central American countries from the Spanish seat of government in Guatemala, and had a tiny indigenous population. These relatively poor territories enjoyed the development of family farms, urban traders, and a capitalist bourgeoisie. Uruguay was colonized as a poor, tiny chunk of Argentina; the British split it from the larger country to make it a buffer between Argentina and Brazil. Essentially a city-state--today half its people live in Montevideo--Uruguay avoided Argentina's gradual decline principally because of Jose Batlle y Ordonez, who was president from 1903 to 1907, and again from 1911 to 1915. Baflle's social-welfare policies created a strong middle class and contributed to decades of political harmony. The country maintained only a token army. In the early 1970s, both Chile and Uruguay saw their long democratic histories interrupted by brutal military coups. But these dictatorships were aberrations imposed on societies whose respect for law and civil society went far beyond the Latin norm. Their democracies now restored, they and Costa Rica have court systems that are fair and efficient, relatively uncorrupt bureaucracies (although this is less so in Costa Rica), and governments that protect, rather than violate, the rights of individuals. History's bequest to the rest of Latin America was far less kind. Most Latins can vote in elections every few years, but they must contend every day with societies whose basis is power, not law. The doors of bureaucracy close in the face of the judges never rule against the wealthy powerful; new entrepreneurs find it almost impossible to navigate huge and compete in a world of nated commerce. Even today, most countries that have the formal attributes democracies and free-market economies operate, just below the surface, like the anciens regimes of premodern Europe. Yet history is not an all-powerful master, and Latin America has not been untouched by events in other parts of the world. Liberalism is now not only the most important political ideal but seemingly the only one--at least among the secular alternatives. As political scientists Larry Diamond, Juan Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset note in Democracy in Developing Countries, Vol. IV, Latin America (1989), liberalism and Islamic fundamentalism are the only political ideologies considered legitimate by those who live under them. But other, more decisive factors lie behind Latin America's move toward genuine liberalization. One is a new seriousness about human rights. Largely because of the international human rights movement (for whose invigoration former U.S. president Jimmy Carter deserves much credit), it is now generally conceded that human and political rights are fundamental requirements for all societies, not just developed, Western countries. Every member of the Organization of American States (OAS) has signed the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, which parallels the 1948 United .Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If this seems unremarkable, one need only recall that 20 years ago many political scientists considered democracy incompatible with the cultures of Spain and Portugal. There is also a new and forceful consensus behind democratic reform and free elections among the regional organizations. Ten years ago it would have been unrealistic, to say the least, to expect the OAS to intervene in favor of democracy, because most of its members were dictatorships. Today, the OAS has a corporate interest in promoting democracy, and the OAS and its related institutions have shown a new interest in going beyond democratic rhetoric. Two examples are the OAS's observer mission to Nicaragua's 1990 elections, and the landmark 1988 decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to hold the Honduran government responsible for "a systematic policy of disappearance" in the case of 120 people who "disappeared" be. tween 1981 and 1984. The next year, the court ordered the government to pay compensation to the families of two victims. Indeed, in most Latin American countries, the principal obstacle to reform has come not from society's poor but from its privileged. Many Latin businessmen--from Brazil's food processors to Peru's tire manufacturers--owe their fortunes to protectionist policies. Not surprisingly, they strongly resist changes that expose them to international competition. Their factories are not efficient enough to compete; they may not even know how to behave in a modern business culture. (One New York investment banker who handles Latin America said he is occasionally offered bribes by Peruvian businessmen to misrepresent their firms' economic health.) In the most backward nations, such as El Salvador, some land and factory owners shoot labor leaders, refuse to pay taxes, and resist any encroachment on the other near-absolute privileges they enjoy. They behave more like feudal lords or the caudillos of yore than bourgeois citizens. If Latin American countries want to emulate Chile's success with liberal economics, it is not Pinochet's dictatorship they should emulate but Chile's civil society, social consensus, rule of law, well-run public institutions, and strong, legitimate state. Capitalists may clamor for authoritarian pro-business policies, but capitalism's long-term interests are served by policies that are almost exactly the reverse. Instead of permitting landowners and businessmen to threaten grassroots organizations, governments should promote unions, peasant federations, and neighborhood associations; such organizations build civil society, deepen democracy, and give the dispossessed a stake in the system. Governments must encourage social pacts that wrest concessions from all sides in business and social conflicts in return for social peace. Governments must collect taxes, fight corruption, keep health clinics stocked with medicines and teachers in the schools, and, most important, build fair and efficient courts. This is already a daunting task for Latin American governments; any economic program that throws more hurdles in the way is doomed to fail. Successful, modern capitalism will not simply emerge a gleaming new edifice when old regulations are chipped away. An economically and politically liberal state demands not fewer rules but new rules--rules that apply to all, sustained not through violence but through the shared conviction that 'it is law, not power, that governs the new world. REFERENCES Miracle at Philadelphia, The Story of Constitutional Convention May to September 1787, Author: Catherine Drinker Bowen, Foreword by Warren E. Burger The Glorious Cause, The American Revolution, 1763-1789, author: Robert Middlekauff Read More