Alexa Weislein H­Civics 9/2/14

Carol Berkin’s A Brilliant Solution For the newly independent United States, the first years after the Revolution were hard times. The states celebrated their newfound freedom, but they did not have a strong central government that would bind them together. Between 1776 and 1787, the struggling new nation faced economic crisis, military weakness and interstate problems. Carol Berkin reveals the conflicts and compromises that characterized the drafting of the Constitution in her book: A Brilliant Solution. As glorified as the U.S. Constitution has become, the strenuous process of crafting laws for governing the American nation was anything but easy. Even though some may argue that the Constitution was divinely inspired, the men who created it were not the historical demigods that myth has made them out to be. According to Berkin, a professor of American history at Baruch College and University of New York, our Founding Fathers were not demigods, but ordinary men with individual faults, that made the process of writing and ratifying the Constitution an amazing challenge. She chronicles the development of the document in this historical nonfiction, recording the details of each of the articles of the Constitution. For instance, she demonstrates the founders' belief in the primacy of the legislative branch. She also portrays the disagreements between Madison's

Federalists and the states' rights advocates, such as George Mason and Edmund Randolph, as both refused to sign the Constitution and swore to fight against its ratification. Most importantly, Berkin emphasizes that the founders saw the Constitution as a document that would require revision as the country grew. The author relies on humanity to reveal the compromises and conflicts during the Constitution’s drafting. She portrays James Madison, George Washington, and the other wealthy elite who met in a miserably humid Philadelphia to present a creative answer to the political crisis that existed under the Articles of Confederation. Berkin portrays reasoning to the Constitution. For example, George Washington, she writes, “believed his role in government was exemplary rather than directive,” and that the president should be a model of decorum “removed from the tarnishing effects of ambition, greed, and factional wrangling” in daily politics. The author says that the Founding Fathers’ narrow­mindedness of centralized government yielded to the reality that citizens prefer looking to a single leader rather than to committees or caucuses. She claims that Americans today have little investment in the workings of the legislative branch, which many of the founders of the Constitution believed should be responsible for electing the president. Berkin reminds us that allowing the people to elect a leader directly was as unnatural as it would be “to refer a trial of colours to a blind man.”

Chronicling the development of the Constitution and recording the details of each article, Berkin consistently reinforces the founders’ belief in the primacy of the legislative branch. She evenly portrays the different advocate sides. Berkin tells a fast­paced story full of sympathetic characters, capturing the human aspects of the legendary first Constitutional Convention. Her account of the Constitution’s creation demonstrates the conflicts that can occur between the Founding Fathers’ intentions and the realities of modern America.