BOOK REVIEW: ‘Henry Clay’

HENRY CLAY: THE ESSENTIAL AMERICAN

By David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler

Random House, $30

567 pages

AT THE EDGE OF THE PRECIPICE: HENRY CLAY AND THE COMPROMISE THAT SAVED THE UNION

By Robert V. Remini

Basic Books, $24

208 pages

REVIEWED BY JAMES SRODES

Once upon a time, a dramatic economic change led Americans to a division over a crucial social issue that was so contentious people wondered whether the nation would survive. Debate deteriorated into diatribe. Eastern establishment liberals poured intemperate scorn on those who challenged their views. Conservatives from the heartland and the Deep South returned scorn with violent protest meetings that sprang up across the country.

Even though a major party controlled both Congress and the White House, neither branch conferred with the other, and the legislative remedy proposed was so vast and complicated that no one was sure what it all meant but everyone was sure there were parts of it that could not be endured. There were threats of violence against leading figures.

If that sounds depressingly current, you will be interested in a previous and all too similar episode in our history when our nation almost came unstuck but didn’t. According to the two books before us, one crucial difference was that in the crisis over slavery that came to a head in 1850, there was a political giant named Henry Clay whose stature was such that a delicately balanced compromise finally was fashioned, thereby postponing what likely was an early move by some Southern states to secede from the Union a full decade before they actually did.

Both biographies make the inescapable point that politics - then and all the more so now - demands good-faith compromises if the public good is to be served and demagoguery is not to accelerate into a government by fiat that prompts public revulsion and reaction. Implicit in both these well-written, detailed stories is the broader point that it is almost impossible to achieve true compromise when any alternative is viewed as an appeasement with the forces of evil; that is, the other side.

This is why men like Henry Clay, when they do exist in our public arena, are so remarkable and so valuable. Both books make this point, but in different ways, and it is hard to say which should be chosen over the other.

The book by the Heidlers, two academic historians, is a classic biography that traces Clay’s extraordinary 50-year career on the national stage. Robert Remini, who is the historian for the U.S. House of Representatives, narrows his focus to Clay’s last great struggle, the Compromise of 1850, and argues quite persuasively that good politics demands great men. One could do worse than read the latter book first and then expand one’s understanding of both Clay and that extraordinary half-century when the face of America changed completely.

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