7/11/2020
Hamilton, In Fiction And History, Is Key To Understanding The Electoral College
Breaking Newstags: Supreme Court, Electoral College, Alexander Hamilton, constitutional history
...
Promoter of the college
Hamilton's word meant something in an election dispute in 1800 and 1801 in part because he had promoted and defended the idea of the Electoral College, when he was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and in the fight to ratify it.
It was part of the marathon presentation Hamilton made in June 1787, just a few weeks after the convention began. In the Broadway show, Miranda's script includes a passing reference to the six-hour length of this speech but does not dwell on the content, which might not play well with contemporary audiences.
Hamilton's construct of a new state reflected his deep distrust of popular voting.
"It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder," the real Hamilton wrote, referring to the "mischief" that might done among the general electorate.
Those phrases appeared in an essay Hamilton wrote nearly a year later, part of a series urging ratification of the Constitution. It was No. 68 in the collection published as The Federalist.
"The sense of the people" should be part of the process, Hamilton wrote. But it would be taken as an "advisement" by the Electoral College, composed of "men most capable of analyzing the qualities" needed for the supreme office, educated and discerning gentlemen who would meet "under circumstances favorable to deliberation."
A more elitist perspective is hard to imagine.
...
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Chair of Florida Charter School Board on Firing of Principal: About Policy, Not David Statue
- Graduate Student Strikes Fight Back Against Decades of Austerity, Seek to Revive Opportunity
- When Right Wingers Struggle with Defining "Woke" it Shows they Oppose Pursuing Equality
- Strangelove on the Square: Secret USAF Films Showed Airmen What to Expect if Nuclear War Broke Out
- The Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
- New Books Force Consideration of Reconstruction's End from Black Perspective
- Excerpt: How Apartheid South Africa Tried to Create a Libertarian Utopia
- Historian's Book on 1970s NBA Shows Racial Politics around Basketball Have Always Been Ugly
- Kendi: "Anti-woke" Part of Backlash Against Antiracist Protest Movements
- Monica Muñoz Martinez Honored for Truth-Telling in Texas History