So today, it turns out, is “Constitution Day,” the 224th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution of the United States. In its honor, it seems appropriate to post the famous Schoolhouse Rock video that to this day remains the reason that I have every word of the Constitution’s Preamble memorized.
It’s a video designed for kids watching Saturday morning cartoons; it’s not a history lesson. Nonetheless, I cannot resist pointing out that the notion that African-Americans had a “seat at the table” in 1787 is of course patently absurd, yet in the cartoon, there one sits in something like a jury box – even though no African-American sat on a jury anywhere in the country until 1860. That fellow looks a good deal happier than one might expect for someone who was just defined as 3/5 of a person, among other indignities. Women, too, were notoriously under-represented at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and in jury service, yet again, lookie there! The video dates from 1976; it’s interesting to think about how such a video would look if it were produced today.
I mention this not to be a Debbie Downer, but rather to point out that the fetishization of the Founding Fathers, and of the Constitution itself, as the source of all that is True™ and Good™ in the world is profoundly ahistorical. Some of the Founders were brilliant and, in some respects, true visionaries. All of them, however, had blind spots that, to modern eyes, should be difficult to accept. They were men of their time, not Platonic guardians. We should thank them and honor them for their fine work – the Constitution is in many respects an excellent document – but we should also not be afraid to point out their failings, and those of the document they produced.
Also, it’s important to remember on this Constitution Day that the purpose of the 1787 document was to strengthen the national government, not to weaken it. The document previously in place, the Articles of Confederation, was a notorious failure precisely because it gave the national government too little power over the individual states. The Constitution dramatically strengthened the national government at the expense of the states’ autonomy, to the considerable consternation of many at the time. The “states’ rights vs. national government” debate in this country has been ongoing since the states came into being in 1776, but it behooves us to remember that, in 1787, those on the side of a stronger national government won the day.
All of that said, Happy Constitution Day. We the People….
Also, from roughly the same era, I present William Shatner at his finest. I do love this one.
Bob Neer says
A quibble, admittedly, but Plato’s vision for a just society as described in The Republic was that philosophers, the only ones capable of properly understanding truth, would be at the top, making the laws — presumably an analog to the Founders. The guardians, noble warriors, served as protectors. Merchants and others rounded out the scene. Slaves played some role, but didn’t count as part of the just community. And the whole thing applied only to Greeks: barbarians need not apply.
hoyapaul says
Nice post, and happy Constitution Day! On this day, I’d offer up one of many potential examples that members of the Tea Party have a number of basic facts about the Constitution blatantly wrong, despite their claims that they adore the document.
One of the most egregious is something I’ve heard repeated by a number of Tea Party members (here’s the example from the “Tea Party Principles” from the New Hampshire Tea Party website):
First of all, there is no “Article 10” of the Constitution. I assume they are referring to the Tenth Amendment. That inaccuracy aside, the Tenth Amendment does not say what these Tea Party members claim. The Tenth Amendment reads, in full:
Notice that the Tea Party version leaves out the “nor prohibited by it to the States” language as well as the fact that reserved powers fall to the people, and not just to the states. Most importantly, look at what word they decide to include in their incorrect version of the Constitution: that the federal government is prohibited from employing all powers not “expressly” delegated to it.
Well, the Constitution never limits the federal government’s power to powers “expressly delegated” to it. But guess which document did “expressly” limit the national government? The Articles of Confederation! Article II of the Articles of Confederation read:
Huh. So the Tea Party is referring to the Articles of Confederation when they make this claim, and not the Constitution. Perhaps Tea Party members should use this day to celebrate the actual Constitution, and not the unworkable document that it replaced.
hoyapaul says
Also, I’d quibble with just one part of David’s post. His broader point about the exclusion of blacks and women in 1787 and for many decades following is, of course, correct. But the implication that the Three-Fifths Compromise was an indignity because it counted African-American slaves as only three-fifths of a person is incorrect.
In fact, it was slaveholders who wanted black slaves to count as a full person. This is because the slave population would then boost Southern representation in Congress. Abolitionists wanted black slaves to count for nothing for the purposes of apportionment, because otherwise slave states would get more representation in Congress despite denying the vote to slaves.
The point being simply that had African-American slaves been defined as anything more than “3/5ths of a person” for the purposes of apportionment, it would have been a bad thing at the time, not a good thing. It was not an indignity but rather a partial victory for abolitionists (and Northern states).
(Nothing changes the fact, of course, that the original Constitution supported and ratified the ultimate indignity and moral stain on the nation — slavery itself.)
David says
But my larger point was your final parenthetical – the 3/5 compromise of course would have been moot if the Founders had done the morally correct thing at the time.
jconway says
It might have been the morally correct thing but it would have led to the Civil War a good eighty years earlier and with the US in a much weaker position, and at that point might have led to a Southern victory in terms of population and economic power as industrialism had yet to occur. Also, the planter class knew it would go extinct in a generation, it was Eli Whitney and his infernal cotton gin that made slavery profitable. Without it, the economic justification for it would have been moot and only its social justifications would have held. In many respects the Southerners of the Founding era, particularly the Founders themselves, were a lot more progressive than the John Calhouns and Jefferson Davis’ that would follow and held all sorts of strange theological and political justifications for that infernal institution their Founding Era counterparts would never have used.
My best political science class, besides To Hell With the Enlightenment was a course called the American Founding that was a real up close study of the various texts of the Constitution. To add to the anti-Tea Party vibe remember it was one of those dreaded cheese eating surrender monkeys by the name of Baron Charles Montesquieu who had the biggest influence over James Madison when it came to drafting the document and conceiving of robust checks and balances. Another area where they are clearly wrong is in the idea of Dominionism whereby the Constitution was conceived by Biblically minded men to protect the Judeo-Christian faiths from government rather than protected government from religion. This view is also patently false, as the founders themselves were quite religiously diverse for the era and included deists, Quakers, Jews, Catholics, alongside mainline Protestants. Thomas Paine, while not a founder wrote several important political pamphlets that were influential on the Founders and was himself an avowed atheist.
sue-kennedy says
Stating that women were underrepresented at the Constitutional Convention suggests that they had some minimal representation, which they didn’t.
Also ability of the Wyoming woman being allowed to sit on a jury in 1863 was quickly reversed. In 1961, the Supreme Court upheld a States right to restrict women from serving on a jury and wasn’t until 1975, (a year before this video), in Taylor v Louisiana that the Supreme Court reversed its 1961 decision and barred the exclusion of women from juries.
Any discussion of the struggle of women for civil rights is often discouraged or dismissed which leads often leads to inaccurate understanding. Thanks for including women’s history in your discussion!
David says
I’m well aware that there were no women there. I was trying for ironic understatement; perhaps I failed.