administration of George Washington until, having been broken by FDR, it
was enacted by constitutional amendment in 1951. It is still only by convention
that presidential electors are bound to vote in accordance with the popular
vote in their state. The greatest change in the course of our constitutional
development has surely been the immense increase in the powers of the presidency.
The words of the text would seem to make him merely the executor of the decisions
in peace and war by the Congress and the Court. Yet that massive economic
and constitutional revolution in domestic and foreign aVairs achieved by
Franklin Roosevelt was accomplished without formal amendment and in the
teeth of judicial resistance. The latter barrier was overcome when FDR’s plan
to pack the Court failed, but was a suYcient threat to cause the Court to
discover in the legal text of the constitution the broader powers of federal
legislation Roosevelt sought for the New Deal. Under Roosevelt and his succes-
sors the ‘‘imperial presidency’’ in peace and war has been achieved step by step,
each incident of increase serving to authorize the next, making the
overall advance a matter of convention rather than judicial interpretation or
constitutional amendment.
Yet despite all these shifts in power within the executive, legislative, and judicial
branches of our constitutional system, its commitment to a separation of
these powers, though not explicitly stated in the legal text, has endured, a conven-
tion as fundamental to our system as its opposite, the fusion of powers, has
proved to be to the British. Despite the best eVorts of reformers, whether politi-
cians or political scientists, the response of the American polity to the new
demands of peace and war, therefore, was not party government, but presidential
leadership.
On both sides of the Atlantic, as the 1960 s dawned the mood was euphoric.
In 1959 Macmillan won reelection on slogans that have not inaccurately
been summarized as ‘‘You never had it so good!’’ At the same time the cheerful
data for the civic culture study of Almond and Verba was being gathered, showing
British trust in their government and politics at a peak among nations. In a
book on postwar Britain published in 1965 and titledBritish Politics in the Collect-
ivist Age, I could conclude, ‘‘Happy the country in which consensus and conXict are
ordered in a dialectic that makes of the political arena at once a market of interests
and a forum for the debate of fundamental moral concerns.’’ In these years the
United States discovered its aZuence, reported its own high pride in its govern-
ment, and, despite the menace of the cold war and the trauma of Kennedy’s
assassination, acclaimed the reforms of Johnson’s Great Society. ‘‘For,’’ as our
foremost authority on presidential elections, Theodore White, proclaimed in
1965 , ‘‘Americans live today on the threshold of the greatest hope in the whole
history of the human race.’’
708 samuel h. beer