(RNS) —Longtime faculty parliamentarian that I’m, I write recently in reward of Henry Martyn Robert, unsung hero of American civilization.
At the same time as you’re going to also very successfully be no longer inclined to beget heard of him, you’ve almost with out a doubt been subjected to the work of which he’s the eponymous progenitor: “Robert’s Solutions of Record.” For successfully over a century it has been the bible of deliberative our bodies from sea to incandescent sea.
Robert the actual person changed into a scion of Huguenot South Carolina, born in, certain, Robertville, in 1837. His father changed into a Baptist preacher and educator who moved the family to Ohio and sold his slaves sooner than the Civil Struggle. In 1857, Henry graduated from the U.S. Navy Academy at West Level with valuable grades and went on to a infamous profession as a navy engineer, within the kill changing into the long-established in mark of the Navy Corps of Engineers.
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The story goes that correct by the Civil Struggle he changed into tapped to bustle a town meeting in Contemporary Bedford, Massachusetts, the assign he’d been despatched to wait on a watch on building of naval defenses against imaginable Confederate attack. Embarrassed that he had no notion guidelines on how to bustle this sort of meeting, he undertook the be aware of parliamentary direction of that turned his enduring ardour.
Assigned to San Francisco as chief engineer of the navy division of the Pacific from 1867 to 1871, Robert walked the innovative Christian trudge, supporting ladies’s rights, working to bolster the plight of Chinese language immigrants and organising a Society for the Rescue of Fallen Girls.
1876 hide of “Robert’s Solutions of Record.” Photo courtesy of Creative Commons
He also threw himself into Baptist governance, a famously fractious world thanks in no shrimp measure to a theology that privileged the actual particular person sense of appropriate and fallacious over ecclesiastical creeds and polities.
“One can scarcely beget had powerful abilities in deliberative conferences of Christians,” he as soon as advised his co-religionists, “with out realizing that the simplest of males having wills of their dangle, are inclined to strive to make their dangle views with out paying adequate admire to the rights of their opponents.”
It changed into precisely in protest to make obvious admire for the rights of opponents that Robert wrote his “Solutions,” the first edition of which seemed in 1876. By the discontinue of the century it had pushed any opponents from the area. Half of 1,000,000 copies sold sooner than the revised edition seemed in 1915.
In most popular years, “Robert’s Solutions” has bought a obvious amount of criticism for privileging competition over consensus, but this fails to make a choice the creator’s deep perception that consensus is simpler to enact when the parties know that, within the discontinue, the subject will procedure to a vote.
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Accounts of Robert’s dangle service on many boards and in a lot of organizations invent certain that he himself labored laborious to notify consensus about, and usually succeeded. What his guidelines aim to make is wait on the entity intact and functioning healthily when consensus fails — similar to came about in his day when his native South Carolina led the Southern states to secede from the Union.
As he summed up his philosophy in Parliamentary Law, a treatise published appropriate sooner than his death in 1923:
The sizable lesson for democracies to be taught is for the majority to present to the minority a burly, free opportunity to fresh their side of the case, after which for the minority, having failed to resolve a majority to their views, gracefully to post and to glimpse the action as that of your entire group, and cheerfully to wait on in carrying it out, till they are able to valid its repeal.
Sad to exclaim, right here’s a lesson that the minority in Robert’s democracy has, in our day, managed to unlearn.
