Our Great Philadelphia Adventure (Part 1)

I've been away for a few days. We went to Philadelphia, my first trip there in thirty-nine years. What a great city!

Of course, we went to Independence Hall. It is amazing to be in the room where the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution came into being.

But I got goosebumps when we walked into another chamber of what was, in Colonial days, the Pennsylvania state house. I recognized the room instantly from portrayals in books and film. It was where the US House of Representatives met for ten years and was the place in which our second president, John Adams, was inaugurated. As Adams delivered his Inaugural Address on March 4, 1797, Thomas Jefferson, the incoming vice president, was seated to his right, and George Washington, the outgoing president, was two seats away.

This event is important because it represents the first time in world history that the chief executive of a nation voluntarily and peacefully stepped down to allow a duly elected successor to take that same position.

We take this for granted these days. But we shouldn't.

After all, up to that point in human experience, power was taken, wielded, and maintained with violence. It was ceded by force of death or by surrender. Here was a leader who could have, had he chosen, held onto executive power until he died. But Washington happily turned the presidency over to Adams and retired to his Mount Vernon estate.

It's a tribute not only to the honorable characters of Washington and Adams that this peaceful transfer of power happened. It also spoke volumes about the other framers of the US Constitution, ratified just eight years before.

The Declaration of Independence trumpeted people's right to be free. But the Constitution, created to replace the weak, ineffectual, and naive if well-intentioned Articles, understood that even free people must opt for mutual responsibility and accountability.

The basic underlying insight of the Constitution is that free people are people, meaning that they're imperfect. The Constitution, imperfect in itself, reflected the hard-won wisdom of pragmatists who saw that human nature being what it is, you can't allow a nation, dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal--paraphrasing Lincoln--to destroy the promise of equality by leaving everything to chance or to people's good will.

Liberty without accountability and freedom without a government strong enough or active enough to prevent the strong and powerful from running roughshod over the humble or constrained enough to prevent it from running roughshod over everyone, is anarchy. The Framers understood this.

Of course, having a philosophical understanding of an important truth about humanity is one thing. Acting on it is another. The Framers did that.

Fortunately for we Americans and for people from every other country who have taken heart from the example given in 1797, Washington believed in the twin principles of the United States--liberty and mutual accountability--and acted accordingly.