Word: agar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...study of the evolving American political system. Herbert Agar not only tries to do justice to both sides of the conflicts and tensions from which the compromise of American democracy has emerged. He also attempts to show that these tensions and disagreements underlie the success of a political system that is logically and ideally impossible, but has endured for a century and a half in which the other nations of the world have run the gamut of political change from anarchy to dictatorship in unending succession...
...Price of Union" is a book about practices rather than ideals, accomplishments rather than programs. In his systematic review of American history from the background of the Revolution to the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt, historian-journalist Agar (Pulitzer Prize winner and former editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal) is always on the history he records-for the opposing pressures and influences from which the events arose...
...Agar's political study takes its impetus from the Revolution and the formation of the Constitution (which he interprets politically as Beard does economically). He then goes on to trace the development of a second, "unwritten" constitution-a compound of political compromises and "bargains" which withstood every problem of national life in the nineteenth century but one, the Civil...
...Agar's optimistic view of the efficacy of the American party system faces its real test in the Civil War; and on this point he averts criticism by staging bluntly that the party and political system failed, for the only time, in the emotional and moral crisis...
...last statement lies Agar's real assessment of the "price" of American union; the fact that we must sacrifice ideals for realities to stay alive and united. His book also shows that "obstruction, evasion, and well-nigh intolerable slowness" are also necessary concomitants of the American political system. But lest the conditions he adds a reminder that "no matter how high one puts the price of federal union, it is small compared to the price which other continents have paid for disunion, and for the little national states in which parties of principle can live (or more often...