Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, September 17th
In preparation for celebrating Constitution Day and Citizenship Day at the West Windsor branch, I’ve been reading up on the history of American political thought. The West Windsor branch will host lawyer, professor, and NJ local government expert Dennis Galvin on September 17th at 7 pm. Constitution Day and Citizenship Day was established by law in 2004, following modifications from a law celebrating Citizenship Day enacted by President Harry Truman in 1955. Promoting civic engagement and encouraging education about the Constitution, Constitution Day and Citizenship Day is a time to explore our Americanness. The Constitution was signed on Sept. 17, 1787 by 39 of the 55 delegates sent by twelve states. Rhode Island, preferring the Articles of Confederation, feared too strong a federal government and did not send delegates. The Constitution was ratified on June 21st, 1788, with the required nine of thirteen states agreeing to adopt it. All thirteen states had ratified the Constitution by May 29th, 1790. As Americans, we don’t share a common religion, traditions, music, food, or much else; however, as Ahkil Reed Amar points out in his book The Constitution: A Biography, the Constitution is the one historical artifact that connects all Americans and those living here to one another.
The Constitution is unique in history. It formed the country by written decree, uniting the states into a new democratic government that was both strong enough to remain in effect for 236 years and flexible enough to adapt, as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and others have noted. Amended 27 times since 1787, the original Constitution fell well short of guaranteeing fundamental human rights to the majority of people living here. Early abolitionist and Quaker Benjamin Lay wrote on this topic in his book published by Benjamin Franklin in 1738:
All slave-keepers that keep the innocent in bondage: apostates pretending to lay claim to the pure & holy Christian religion, of what congregation so ever, but especially in their ministers, by whose example the filthy leprosy and apostacy is spread far and near: it is a notorious sin which many of the true Friends of Christ and his pure truth, called Quakers, has been for many years and still are concern'd to write and bear testimony against as a practice so gross & hurtful to religion, and destructive to government beyond what words can set forth, or can be declared of by men or angels, and yet lived in by ministers and magistrates in America.
The drafters of the Constitution would have been aware of his protests and familiar with his ideas. The failures of our founding document to protect human rights have plagued our country throughout its history. Just one example is discriminatory voter laws requiring literacy tests and other barriers to voting. Voter discrimination persisted long after the 15th Amendment, which prohibits denying anyone the right to vote based on race, color, or position of servitude, leading Lyndon B. Johnson to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Due to further discrimination, the Act had to be amended several times.
Regardless of its failures and successes, the Constitution defines us as a country, and every person in the United States who is able will benefit from understanding it. Here are some books in our collection that provide context for meaning and interpretation.
This is the first of Reed’s trilogy which he calls his love letter to America. This book examines the history and traditional uses of the terms and phrases used in the Constitution. Some of his views are controversial, but his authority as an American legal historian is unquestionable.
If you consider yourself an open-minded citizen of the world, you probably have Enlightenment philosophers in part to thank. The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters opens with a narrative about the mathematician and French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, who developed integral calculus. He writes on the purpose of education in 1789 during the French Revolution:
Offer all individuals of the human race the means to provide for their needs, to ensure their well-being, to know and exercise their rights, to understand and fulfil their duties, to ensure for each one the faculty of perfecting his industry, to render himself capable of the social functions to which he has the right to be called, to develop the whole range of talents with which nature has endowed him, and by this means to establish between all citizens an equality of fact and to reali[z]e the political equality recogni[z]ed by the law - this must be the first goal of national educational system.
These sentiments were written into the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The author’s research interests are nationalism, internationalism, empire, and the history of political thought.
Robertson argues that the cultivation of happiness defines the Enlightenment. He quotes a leading contemporary historian: “the commitment to understanding and hence advancing the causes and conditions of human betterment in the world, [...] gave the Enlightenment its intellectual coherence.” It is lengthy, but offers a lot in the way of understanding modern liberalism.
With 133 pages of text, including photos of Supreme Court Justices and the Constitution in the Appendix, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens gives a mini-lesson on the legal history of some of the longest-running political debates in America. Justice Stevens explains the origins of Gerrymandering (hint: a congressional district was made into the shape of a salamander.) For example, the “Anti-Commandeering” rule states that the Federal government can’t force state officials to take on federal duties. Justice Stevens argues that the Constitution implied a stronger federal government than the Articles of Confederation and that the rules in the Constitution were in addition to those in the Articles of Confederation, which suggests the need to abandon this rule. He also argues that sovereign immunity, which protects certain government officials from prosecution, is a carry-over from English law, which held that the King could do no wrong, and should also be changed.
Kant’s philosophy tells us that reason is the ultimate guide to the good life. Karen Stohr writes that Kant doesn’t think we can know if we have free will or whether there is a God, but we can act as if we have free will, and we can hope that there is a God. She goes on to write that he believes that the voice of morality comes from us and that we have the power to act morally. Morality, Kant believes, is something we have to figure out for ourselves. Our founding fathers were familiar with Kant’s philosophy and believed that we could think and behave rationally if we were given the rights provided for in the Constitution.
Constitution Day and Citizenship Day is a nice reminder to stay curious about the foundation of our laws and the beliefs that inform them. Let us know in the comments if you enjoy learning about the Constitution and United States’ History.
-Ellen, West Windsor Branch
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