On the evening of December 16, 1773, in Boston, several score Americans, some badly disguised as Mohawk Indians, their faces smudged with blacksmith’s coal dust, ran down to Griffin’s Wharf, where they boarded three British vessels. Within three hours, the men—members of the Sons of Liberty, an intercolonial association bent on resisting British law—had cracked open more than 300 crates of English tea with hatchets and clubs, then poured the contents into Boston Harbor.
On the frigid and stormy evening of February 27, 1860, so the newspapers reported, Abraham Lincoln climbed onto the stage of the cavernous Great Hall of New York’s newest college, Cooper Union, faced a room overflowing with people, and delivered the most important speech of his life.
Or so the myths maintained. In truth, a quarter of the hall’s 1,800 plush seats remained empty for the evening’s vigorously advertised political lecture. But not because of the weather—which was clear and balmy. Some eyewitnesses, and most historians since, would stubbornly report that a blizzard raged that night (“the profits were so small . . . because the night was so stormy,” insisted one organizer). But Lincoln supporters may have created that legend to explain away the empty seats. Chalk up the less-than-sold-out house to indifference and competition from other events and attractions.
On October 11, 1918, late in the afternoon, a platoon of American doughboys marched to the front in eastern France, passing shattered villages, forests reduced to matchsticks, and water-filled shell craters. At every step the Americans struggled to free their boots from the slopping mud. Icy wind and rain slashed at their clothing, and water poured in steady streams from the rims of their helmets, somewhat obscuring the devastation. They were already exhausted, some literally asleep on their feet, little aware that they soon would find themselves fighting the bloodiest single battle in U.S. history.
In 1965, after winning in a landslide against Barry Goldwater and helping to carry Democratic supermajorities into both houses of Congress, President Lyndon Johnson set out to enact a battery of Great Society reforms, including Medicare, government insurance for seniors. Despite his political mandate, 60 years of conservative opposition to such a measure meant proceeding with caution. Later, California Governor Ronald Reagan, for example, would characterize the Medicare bill as the advance wave of a socialism that would “invade every area of freedom in this country.” Reagan predicted that this reform would compel Americans to spend their “sunset years telling our children and our grandchildren what it was like in America when men were free.”
Not long after Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in on March 4, 1933, he began work on his “big bill.” It embraced several of his highest aspirations: universal health care, old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and more, including a provision to make the federal government the employer of last resort in what many economists considered a “mature” economy whose private-sector employment component was destined to be chronically deficient.
“I see no reason why every child, from the day he is born, shouldn’t be a member of the social security system,” he told Frances Perkins, his secretary of labor. “When he begins to grow up, he should know he will have old-age benefits. . . . If he is out of work, he gets a benefit. If he is sick or crippled, he gets a benefit. . . . And there is no reason why just the industrial workers should get the benefit of this. Everybody ought to be in on it—the farmer and his wife, and his family. . . . Cradle to the grave—from the cradle to the grave they ought to be in a social insurance system.”
On a raw evening in winter of 1850, a weary-looking, feeble, and desperately ill old man arrived unannounced at the Washington, D.C. residence of Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky had come to seek Webster’s help in his battle to save the Union. He believed that Webster’s legendary eloquence would be essential in preventing what appeared to be a headlong rush by Southern states to secede from the Union and possibly initiate civil war.
Webster welcomed his colleague and noticed that the 72-year-old Clay looked ill and coughed incessantly. (Neither man would live another three years.) He listened intently as the Kentuckian outlined a compromise that would at least postpone a national crisis that had begun as a result of a war with Mexico that both men had opposed.
On February 13, 1819, the 35-year-old Congressman William Cobb unfolded his six-foot frame from his chair in the chamber of the Old Brick Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and locked his gray eyes on James Tallmadge Jr. of New York. There was little love lost between the grandson of Georgia’s most famous patriarch and the accomplished city lawyer. They had tangled on issues before, Cobb eloquently if savagely attacking Andrew Jackson over his campaign in Florida against the Seminoles; Tallmadge had defended the general with equal vigor.
Compromise has become a bad word for many in the political sphere. Yet our history shows that it’s the way things get done and how the country moves forward. From our founders who cobbled together the Constitution, to the genial dealmaking of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill, the will to compromise has proven not only a virtue, but our saving grace in times of crisis.
Of course, fierce political disagreement is nothing new in our nation’s capital. One president complained that his opponents were interested in “victory more than truth,” attacking him with “the most abominable misrepresentations.” That president, George Washington, was practically driven from office by what he called “arrows of malevolence” shot by his political foes.
Since then, partisanship has devolved into impassioned shouting matches, fistfights, and a nearly fatal beating. And that was just inside the Capitol building.