When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  The influence of Cicero on the Founding Fathers was substantive as well as stylistic. The men who gathered in Freedom Hall in Philadelphia during the sweltering summer of 1787 were the beneficiaries of a classical school curriculum. The Federalist Papers, written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, borrowed the form of a speech by Demosthenes and were published under the name of Publius. In the constitutional debates of May to September 1787, delegates had invoked the heroes and the institutions of the Roman republic as models for their utopian task. The early revolutionary pamphlets had been strewn with Latin and Greek tags and quotations from Thucydides and Cicero. In his Defence of the Constitutions of Governments of the United States of America, John Adams had applauded Cicero’s case for a mixed government of monarchical, aristocratic and democratic elements.

  Cicero’s argument was that the consuls were a form of monarchy, the senate a form of aristocracy, and the masses were the element of democracy. Adams and James Madison both attributed the falls of Greece and Rome to the imbalance between the different estates of the realm. This was why the Constitution was replete with checks on power. It was why the Founders inserted a provision to prevent the rule of a demagogue which they regarded as instrumental in the decline of the Roman Republic. Article Two of the constitution, which limits the term and powers of the president, was precisely designed to prevent a Caesar-like figure from assuming command.

  Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good. I have never whispered a syllable of them abroad. Within these walls they were born, and here they shall die. If every one of us in returning to our Constituents were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavour to gain partisans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary effects & great advantages resulting naturally in our favour among foreign Nations as well as among ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity.

  Often a good speech is a series of variations on a single theme. Franklin really has one point – men should not allow the fictional perfect to be the enemy of the acceptable good. To do so imperils the nation that we are here to constitute. His variation here is to point out that, as a diplomat in Britain and France, he had always been loyal to the republic.

  Yet, as there usually is with Franklin, there is a clever subtext. There is an ingratiating, cleverly coded, second argument. On the surface Franklin is requesting acquiescence with an imperfect constitution. At the same time, his stylistic conceit, of admitting to doubt, also has the effect of making those doubts plain. If the constitution passes, Franklin can claim to have convinced the doubters. If it does not pass, there is plenty of evidence that Franklin never really believed in the constitution anyway. There are two speeches written through every line, one that is saving the constitution and the other that is saving face.

  This can only be done because Franklin is who he is. The character of the Grand Old Man of American politics lends authority to the argument. Quite outrageously, Franklin claims to stand above the fray, like a surveying monarch. He is, at once, an ingratiating activist and an impartial spectator. This touches on one of the perennial paradoxes of democratic power and of nationhood. The association of Franklin and Washington, the two titans of the revolutionary struggles, was critical to the success of the convention. So the system of government that enshrined the power of the people was, at the same time, built on a cult of leadership. The nation has always needed its heroes.

  Much of the strength and efficiency of any Government in procuring and securing happiness to the people, depends, on opinion, on the general opinion of the goodness of the Government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its Governors. I hope therefore that for our own sakes as a part of the people, and for the sake of posterity, we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this Constitution (if approved by Congress and confirmed by the Conventions) wherever our influence may extend, and turn our future thoughts and endeavours to the means of having it well administered. On the whole, Sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

  Suddenly, with the conclusion looming, Franklin makes a personal appeal. The rest of the speech would lead us to expect him to say, in biblical fashion, ‘Let us hope’. But he doesn’t. He says, much more directly, ‘I hope …’ He then increases the stakes by enfolding future generations, for the sake of posterity. Note then how artfully Franklin changes his demand. The whole speech has been a request for a hearing, for tolerance, for a spirit of reason to allow the nation to come to fruition. The speech has been a set-up, a kind of verbal larceny, because here, in a sentence, Franklin undercuts the dominant ethos and demands unanimity for his brand of tolerated dissent.

  The extent to which Franklin intended this speech as an act of persuasion is shown by the fact that it was printed and published widely in America. It was an appeal to the republic as well as to its leaders, and it became a touchstone in the debate in the states over ratification. This was a more common tactic in an age before electrification, in which the distinction between the oral and the written was not marked. First television and then the internet have remade the connection now that speeches are cut up and disseminated in bites digestible in different formats.

  This is the one defence of the accusation that modern political rhetoric is a slave to the soundbite. A speech is going to be edited down to a six-second definition by a broadcaster in any case, so it’s better that the writing, by encapsulating the main thought in a witty maxim, should be a guide to that editing. The other defence is that soundbites are as old as writing. To be or not to be – that really was the question of the play, and if Shakespeare were to be given a quick segment of the six o’clock news he would have been disappointed if that line was not picked up in the report.

  Franklin then goes on to make the critical point that politics begins rather than ends with signatures on a Constitution. The nation starts with those signatures; the job is simply beginning. Political wisdom is a process of governing well, not the words of a blueprint. But the first step in the process is to sign the document.

  The speech inspired personal vituperation. Some correspondents took issue not just with the words Franklin wrote for the convention but the course of his whole career. As Franklin later wrote to his French friend Le Veillard: ‘Much party heat there was, and some violent personal abuse’. Read now, there seems to be a strain of valedictory melancholy to Franklin’s words. This was the culmination of a distinguished life as a propagandist and persuader. It would be too much to ascribe the outcome to this speech alone. Assessing the contribution of a single rhetorical moment is always hard. In any event, the constitution was signed by thirty-nine out of the fifty-five delegates. It was then submitted to the states for approval, which did emerge. The Constitution was eventually ratified by the required nine states in 1788. The eloquence of all the early founders had contributed a chapter to the creation of the American nation, but Benjamin Franklin merits his place in that pantheon.

  JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

  A Tryst with Destiny

  Constituent Assembly, Parliament House, New Delhi

  14 August 1947

  Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) was the hero of the generation of the midnight’s children who saw India from colonialism into democracy. When he was born, in 1889, Queen Victoria was empress of India. By the time he died, in 1964, he had served for almost two decades as the first prime minister of an independent India. Nehru fathered a dynasty as well as a nation. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, and his grandson Rajiv both became prime ministers of India, although both were assassinated. The Nehru family remains a significant presence in the Congress Party to this day.

  The transition to
democracy in India was in defiance of immense scepticism that a country so varied, a nation with no tradition of democracy, could govern itself after its freedom from rule as a distant outpost of the British Empire. An experiment with democracy perhaps even more extraordinary than the formation of the United States began on 15 August 1947. With a brief hiatus under a state of emergency in 1975, this nation of multiple languages and religions found a solvent in democracy. This achievement is owed in no small part to Jawaharlal Nehru.

  Nehru was drawn into active political opposition to the British Raj, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of an India reborn and his strategy of non-violent non-cooperation with the imperial rulers. In 1919 he joined the Indian National Congress, which was fighting for greater autonomy from the British. During the 1920s and 1930s he was repeatedly imprisoned by the British for civil disobedience. In 1929 he was elected president of the Congress Party. By the end of the Second World War, he had become Gandhi’s designated successor, though they drifted apart on a question of tactics. Gandhi regarded peaceful methods as indispensable, conferring a spiritual benefit on the practitioner as well making an irresistible persuasive case. Nehru, always more radical, had come to see peaceful cooperation as one method among others.

  Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad, the son of a wealthy civil lawyer who had moved from Kashmir. In 1905, at the age of sixteen, Jawaharlal left the family mansion and his father’s collection of vintage cars to take up the education of an English gentleman of the upper class, at Harrow School, Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Inner Temple. Nehru developed some expensive habits in London and regularly wired home to ask his father to send more money. The style and attitudes of England were a constant touchstone in later criticism of his rule. Nehru paid a high personal price for his politics. As his biographer Judith Brown has written, he sacrificed his life, his family and friendships, and in the end his health, to his political project. Nehru’s private life was, in fact, a tableau of tragedy. He endured the death of both parents, of a baby son and, in 1936, of his wife, which left him to bring up his only daughter, Indira, alone.

  The context for the speech is the breakdown of constitutional negotiations between Nehru’s Congress Party and the British Raj. The tactic of civil disobedience had resumed and its leadership was in jail. The willingness of the British government to resist the claim of independence had withered, though. By 1942, the British government had declared that India would be free. Nehru played a central role in the negotiations over Indian independence. As Gandhi was wrapped up in combating violence Nehru stepped into the void. He was re-elected Congress president in mid-1946, and from that position became the vice-president of the interim government that preceded independence. Nehru opposed the Muslim League’s insistence on the division of India on the basis of religion, only reluctantly agreeing when Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, decreed that partition was the quickest and most easily workable solution.

  The road to independence was not without blood, and the future of Indian democracy was not a straight road either, yet 1947 was a unique historical moment. This was the first time that any European state had voluntarily handed authority over to its former colonial subjects. The barriers to success were high and its likelihood of success low. This year, 2017, is the seventieth anniversary of Indian democracy.

  Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

  One of rhetoric’s tempting dangers is its music. A euphonious phrase can have an emotional effect even if it doesn’t, on reflection, stand scrutiny. Here Nehru is turning the phrase towards the light. ‘Tryst with destiny’ is a delicious phrase, but in what sense is a tryst needed if an event is destined? Nehru goes on to say that the nation made a pledge to destiny which it shall now redeem. Yet if there is any choice in the matter of whether or not to redeem, then it is not destiny we are dealing with. Indeed, destiny has not turned up ‘wholly or in full measure’, which is Nehru’s first lament for partition.

  But the philosophical contradiction doesn’t matter much. A phrase is fleeting and one goes straight from utterance into the memory. In any case, the Indian audience would have been appreciative of the idea of a destiny. Independence was set for 15 August, but the astrologers declared 14 August more auspicious. Nehru’s compromise was that India’s assembly would be convened on the afternoon of 14 August and continue in session until Nehru’s speech, which would begin shortly before midnight.

  This gave his claim that the world was sleeping a touch of poetic licence, as it was early evening in Britain, for example. Then, to the chiming of an English clock and the blowing of Indian conch shells, independent India would be born. It is certainly a momentous occasion. Nehru’s claim is a vast one – that a new age has begun – and in almost all such instances it would be excessive. Here it is nothing of the sort. The weight of events lends gravity to the words, and Nehru delivers them with sober tranquillity.

  It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity. At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future? Freedom and power bring responsibility. The responsibility rests upon this assembly, a sovereign body representing the sovereign people of India. Before the birth of freedom we have endured all the pains of labour and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow. Some of those pains continue even now. Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now.

  ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,’ said Ernst Renan, one of the best thinkers on nationalism. India, as a nation, does not really have any centuries to track, and it certainly did not begin with the dawn of history. There has indeed been a civilisation in this territory for ages past, but the idea of India is being born with this speech. The unending quest is coming to a beginning, not an end. ‘It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny,’ said Nehru on another occasion. Nehru is not describing India here; he is creating it.

  There is, though, an air of trepidation in his words that comes in part from the sorrow at partition and its dreadful human toll. Nehru is referring to the slaughter between Hindus and Muslims that was raging in cruel fashion as he spoke. As Nehru rose he would have been aware that Sir Cyril Radcliffe, working under Mountbatten, had delivered the report that would draw the boundary between India and Pakistan. An explicit reference would have changed the tone from triumph to elegy, but Mountbatten insisted the report be kept secret until after 15 August in any case.

  There is more to Nehru’s trepidation though than partition, as important as it was. Nehru is about to pass from the exciting era of protest into the grind of administration. A generation of dissidents is about to learn the statecraft of running a nation of which it has, until this moment, been critical. Nehru effects what is, in rhetorical terms, a rather brutal shift here from the past to the future. It comes with a lurch, as if to say, there is no point dwelling on anything. We have a tryst with destiny.

  That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today. The service of India means the service of
the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.

  In this passage Nehru both embraces Gandhi and distances himself from him. The compliment to ‘the greatest man of our generation’ is all the better for not including his name, but there is a back-hand. Gandhi’s aim, to wipe the tears from every eye, is gently slighted as probably beyond human capability.

  To Gandhian utopianism Nehru contrasts what he regards as the more earthly delights of social democracy. In time those delights were to prove more elusive than he envisaged. Though the economic growth rate of India after independence was much better than the collapse that had been overseen by the British, it remained stuck stubbornly at an average of 2.5 per cent per annum. The rest of Nehru’s ambition is still unfulfilled. Seventy years on, a third of the world’s poor live in India and inequality blights the nation. In particular, India’s growth as a nation will be curtailed as long as it fails to properly educate the majority of its citizens, especially in basic literacy.