It’s Constitution Day!
“History is who we are and why we are the way we are,” declares bestselling author David McCullough. No era is this more true of for Americans than the pivotal years that gave birth to our Constitution.
The journey leading to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia began twelve years earlier in New England with the opening shots of the American Revolution. British policies of control and taxation in the aftermath of the French and Indian War had undermined colonial self-government and enraged Americans up and down the eastern seaboard.
Deeply influenced by English tradition, the colonists believed that government, even the king, was under the law. Moreover, they held that people had the right to elect their own assemblies, and only a popularly elected assembly had the right to levy taxes on them, regulate their commerce, or police their community. This is what they meant by “No Taxation without Representation.”
One year after the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord and with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the revolution became a war for independence. What was declared on paper, though, had to be earned in blood. The American Revolution brought great hardship and suffering to the American people, and its result was in no way a foregone conclusion.
Following the eight-year long war for independence, the American people grappled with how to function as a newly independent country. The Articles of Confederation, approved in 1781, marked the colonies’ first collective attempt at a credible national government. Having failed miserably, the Articles were scrapped by the delegates sent to Philadelphia in 1787 to “revise” them.
The Constitution went into formal effect two years after the Constitutional Convention, when the required number of states had ratified and a new government had been elected. In 1791, ten amendments introduced by Virginia Representative James Madison and inspired by George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, were added to the Constitution. They are known collectively as the Bill of Rights. In all, twenty-seven amendments have been added to the U.S. Constitution during the course of America’s history.
Of course, all this draws little more than a collective yawn from Americans today. Polls and surveys taken over the last ten years have repeatedly shown Americans’ appalling ignorance of their own history. The U.S. Department of Education says that less than a quarter of our nation’s students are proficient in either history or civics. In fact, a 2001 report showed that about six out of ten high school seniors lacked even a basic knowledge of American history.
A 2006 survey published by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum says that only one in four Americans can name more than one of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution’s First Amendment, while more than half can name two members of the Simpson cartoon family.
Perhaps the most popular and familiar examples of historical ignorance can be found in Jay Leno’s late-night “Man on the Street” interviews.
Let’s face it. As a collective group, when it comes to history, we are clueless and mighty ungrateful. Yet this “historical illiteracy,” as David McCullough calls it, should alarm us, not amuse us. It would certainly alarm our Founding Fathers, since they were almost universal in emphasizing the importance of historical memory. According to John Adams, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.”
Well, Mr. Adams, we are in deep trouble.
