In
November 2009, John Boehner, speaker of the U.S. House of
Representatives, stood before a Tea Party rally waving a pocket-sized
pamphlet proclaiming, "This is my copy of the Constitution.
And I'm going to stand here with our Founding Fathers, who wrote in
the preamble: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with
certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness'."
Had Boehner spent less time waving and more time reading the
Constitution, he would know he was quoting from the Declaration of
Independence, an equally important but entirely different document.
Even as we celebrate Constitution Day today, we must admit that
Boehner's mistake is all too common in a country that is more
interested in venerating than actually understanding the Constitution
and the historical context that produced it.
The Constitution grew out of the democratic ferment inspired by the
American Revolution. The leaders of the movement for
independence came largely from the wealthy classes, either northern
merchants like John Hancock or southern planters like George
Washington, who believed they had reached a level of economic
development sufficient to take over the leadership role in the former
British colonies. To justify their actions, revolutionary
leaders drew on the political ideology of English republicanism,
including such ideas as equality and popular sovereignty.
In the writings of revolutionary propagandists like Thomas Paine and
documents like the Declaration of Independence, such ideas took on a
strongly democratic tone. And in the aftermath of declaring
independence, as each state debated, wrote, and ratified its own
constitution, more people than ever before in modern western history
became involved in the political process. The newly drafted
state constitutions reflected this democratizing influence, as each
state created a weak executive branch and vested most of the power in
the popularly elected legislatures.
If anything, this spreading democracy accelerated after the
Revolution ended in 1783. In late 1786, for instance, farmers in
western Massachusetts, many of them Revolutionary War veterans, rose
in what came to be called Shays’ Rebellion. Hard-pressed by debt,
high property taxes, and a distant government, the rebels marched on
county courthouses to prevent foreclosure hearings before eventually
being put down by the state militia. Equally worrisome to
representatives of wealth and stability was that these democratic
forces were increasingly turning to electoral politics, and state
legislatures were beginning to pass laws aiding debt-ridden farmers
and equalizing tax burdens.
In this context, the guardians of wealth pushed back, trying to
restrain the social forces the Revolution had set in motion, a
process that culminated in the 1787 Constitutional convention. As
James Madison would write in defense of the Constitution, “the most
common and durable source of factions has been the various and
unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are
without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”
The framers of the Constitution made clear they stood with property
holders.
In drafting the Constitution, Madison and the others at the
convention took steps to rein in what they saw as the democratic
excesses of the 1780s. For instance, the Constitution prohibited
state legislatures from passing “laws impairing the obligation of
contracts.” And in the event of future rebellions, it gave the
national government the power to “suppress insurrections.”
As historian Gordon Wood has said, then, in the effort to draft and
ratify the Constitution, “the quarrel was fundamentally one between
aristocracy and democracy.”
But in this struggle, the defenders of aristocracy could not do
whatever they wanted. At the Constitutional convention, Alexander
Hamilton gave a speech advocating a president and senate indirectly
elected for life and granting the national government power to
appoint state governors, with veto power over any laws passed by
state legislatures.
While most delegates to the convention probably would have preferred
Hamilton’s plan, they knew it was impossible. It would be
necessary to make accommodations to this democratic spirit. Thus the
authors of the Constitution allowed for popular election to the House
of Representatives and chose not to place property qualifications on
voters. In addition, in order to secure ratification of the
Constitution, proponents agreed to add a Bill of Rights guaranteeing
the liberties of individuals and states against the powers of this
new national government.
Popular pressure, in other words, made the final product much more
democratic than its framers ever intended.
On this Constitution Day, it is useful to remember that the
Constitution we revere was born of class struggle and that it remains
contested terrain in the ongoing quarrel between aristocracy and
democracy.
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