Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has lately mustered the gumption to compare himself favorably with one of his most distinguished predecessors: venerable Henry Clay of Kentucky, the most prominent Congressional leader of the early 19th century and quite possibly the most formidable politician ever known to the House of Representatives, the Senate, or indeed, the city of Washington.
The howls of laughter that one would expect to inevitably greet such a statement as Gingrich's - laughter of the same variety one would hear were Bill Clinton ever so vain or foolish as to compare himself with, say, FDR - have yet to be heard in connection with Gingrich's prematurely optimistic appraisal of his would-be place in history. The absence of those chuckles is not, I suspect, the result of informed public consensus with Gingrich's ambitious prediction. The silence is, rather, a consequence of that general historical illiteracy that Robert Penn Warren recognized as "the damnation of the modern of world."
One would think that as an historian himself Speaker Gingrich would understand the very, very high bar that he or anyone else must jump over before getting anywhere near the historical importance of Henry Clay. For as a Lincoln or an FDR are to the presidency, so is Clay to the Speakership, to congressional (including senatorial) careers in general, and indeed to the essence of American statesmanship. Few have been greater than he, or have had more profound an impact on their era.
So great were the greatest of Clay's achievements as Speaker of the House, diplomat, and senator, that they have become fundamental benchmarks in the timeline of U.S. history - benchmarks that no student can (or, at least, should) escape high school without learning.
In 1814, Clay resigned his House seat and the Speakership at the request of President James Madison in order to serve as a key member of the diplomatic team sent to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, thus ending the war with England that had begun, very much at Clay's insistence, in 1812.
In 1820, again as Speaker, Clay was instrumental in devising the Missouri Compromise , which temporarily resolved the bitter sectional dispute over the extension of slavery into the West and accomplished what was to Clay the most vital of imperatives: the preservation of the Union.
In 1831, Clay won election as senator from Kentucky and became leader of the opposition to Andrew Jackson. He ran unsuccessfully against Jackson for the presidency in 1832; and in the process he became the philosophical father of that movement which eventually coalesced into the Whig Party.
In 1849, after seven years of self-prescribed absence from Congress and yet another unsuccessful run for the presidency, Clay returned to the Senate. And now his skill at political compromise - already demonstrated in the Missouri debate - proved crucial once again. Victory in the Mexican War had brought bitter division over whether slavery would be allowed in the conquered Southwest. Clay, working in tandem with his friend and colleague Daniel Webster, helped persuade Congress to accept the Missouri Compromise (1850), thus preserving the Union yet again.
In addition to these accomplishments, Clay served as Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams (1825-29), during which time he enunciated the "Good Neighborhood" policy of U.S.- Latin American relations and was offered, and refused, appointment to the Supreme Court.
Along with Webster and Adams, Clay's closest colleagues in public life were no less than Thomas Hart Benton and John C. Calhoun. Abraham Lincoln met "the great compromiser" and "defender of the union" but once and wound up idolizing him forever. Clay was Lincoln's "beau ideal of a statesman" and "the man for whom I fought all my life."
In other words: this was no small man, Henry Clay. This was no shooting star rocketing briefly through the heavens. Clay served as a robust, enduring light in the American political firmament for more than four critical decades. And when he died (at age 75 in 1852), he was mourned not by just the small constituency of a district or state, but rather by a nation.
It was not so long ago that Dan Quayle had to be reminded that he is no John Kennedy. Likewise we must now point out to Newt Gingrich that he is no Henry Clay - at least not yet. We suppose it may be possible that he might demonstrate, over the long years, the wit and fortitude and historical significance that would put him in the same class as Clay. But when and if he ever reaches that apex, he will be the last person who will have to point out to us the luminous fact of his ascension.
31 March 1995