On the subject of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, reader Mike Weatherford writes:

I’m currently reading Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia. Excellent book, well-written, and not dull. It’s a miracle that anything got done with such a collection of political hotheads. That the final document has served us so well for so long is a tribute to their tenacity and vision.

Dr. Boli agrees that our current Constitution is a tribute to the tenacity of the hotheads in Philadelphia. He has always suspected that delegates finally succeeded in coming to agreement on both the Declaration of Independence and, eleven years later, the Constitution because both assemblies were held in Philadelphia in the summer. A summer in Philadelphia makes any compromise seem preferable to spending another day in Philadelphia; the beastly heat would eventually wear down the most intransigent sectionalist. It can hardly be coincidence that, when the time came to pick a permanent national capital, the founders of our nation settled on the one site where the summer climate was even worse. Dr. Boli believes that much reform could be accomplished simply by prohibiting air conditioning in both houses of Congress.

As for our founders’ vision, at last count 27 serious errors in the original Constitution have been discovered and corrected. Furthermore, at least one of those corrections was itself a serious error.

Dr. Boli believes, in fact, that the great strength of our Constitution is its lack of vision, or even principle. Delegates committed to democracy would have insisted that the president be elected by the people. Delegates committed to aristocracy would have insisted that the president be chosen by the Senate. Delegates committed to getting out of Philadelphia before their brains melted into their collars were willing to accept the positively lunatic compromise that the people should vote for a number of electors more or less proportional to the populations of their states, but giving slightly more influence to the smaller states, and then those electors should meet and vote for the president. They did not accept it because anyone was happy about that idea, but because no one was more unhappy about it than he was about being stuck in Philadelphia in the summer.

Any number of other nations have imposed perfectly rational constitutions on their people, and the end result has always been a descent into tyranny and massacre. We grudgingly accepted a bundle of half-baked compromises that no sane person could enthusiastically embrace, and we have toddled along pretty well with it for a while now.

On this day in 1787, delegates from the thirteen states assembled in Philadelphia with the ostensible purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation. In reality, their secret intention was to replace the existing government altogether with a completely new constitution. The convention, which straggled on into the middle of September, still holds the record as the longest and dullest coup d’état in history.

Second Series.

Sullivan, Sir Arthur. It was not revealed until many years after his death that Sir Arthur Sullivan’s famous “Lost Chord” was in fact stolen. Fearing a scandal, Sir Arthur had refused to refer the matter to the police.