Word: hutchinsons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...procedural change seemed eminently reasonable. Congressman Edward Hutchinson, senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, gave it strong support-though he has disagreed with Rodino on some other matters. "I never heard of a judicial or even a quasi-judicial proceeding," he said, "where witnesses under oath would be questioned by 38 or 40 people." But many other House Republicans were angry at Rodino, and they rebelled against their own leadership. The change would amount to "parliamentary suicide," declared Congressman David Dennis of Indiana. In the end, 120 Republicans (out of 187) opposed the rules change, and the motion fell...
...Hutchinson never stopped complaining that the private letters Benjamin Franklin obtained and circulated in Boston, setting off an outburst of hatred for Hutchinson, were distorted. He never stopped insisting that by the words, "there must be an abridgement of English liberties," he had not meant that there should be an abridgement of English liberties, but that Parliamentary representation for the colonies was so unfeasible that there had to be an abridgement, that there already was an abridgement, and that people should therefore try to minimize rather than overcome...
...useless, naturally. To people convicted that English liberties should not be abridged, even the best explanation of why they were was simply irrelevant--and when it was coupled with measures to strengthen and cement the government doing the abridging, treasonable as well. In the same way, the complexity of Hutchinson's position on the Stamp Act--that thought it was an ill-conceived tax which people should petition Parliament to repeal, rejecting Parliament's authority to pass it struck at the foundations of the English government that protected all American freedoms--meant little to his opponents. They were engaged...
ULTIMATELY, the Revolutionaries even accepted the absurdity to which Hutchinson tried to reduce their arguments. If he was right in saying that sovereignty was indivisible, that the only alternative to an absolute power was absolute independence, then they would pick absolute independence--and he, still trying to induce the sovereign to act intelligently, would be as much an enemy as the sovereign himself. Two centuries later, people would hear that leaving briefcases on the floor to hold an illegal antiwar march presaged the end of education and government as they had known it, and decide that maybe that would...
...great strength of Bailyn's book that it understands and apparently sympathizes with both sides--but especially with Hutchinson, the embattled loser--and yet acknowledges that the future and America's hopes lay with Hutchinson's opponents...