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Photo by Gregg Trusty/LSUS News

Thank You, Mr. President

Dr. John R. Vile, professor and chair of the Political Science Department at Middle Tennessee State University, portrays President James Madison in a campus presentation sponsored by the LSUS American Studies Program. Vile, who played to a packed University Center Theater, is the author of The Constitutional Convention of 1787: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of America’s Founding.

John R. Vile: Don't forget Constitution Day on Sunday

September 13, 2006
The ( Shreveport) Times

The U.S. has done more to celebrate the Declaration of Independence, which members of the Second Continental Congress signed on July 4, 1776, than the U.S. Constitution, which delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed on Sept. 17, 1787.

Celebrations of the centennials, sesquicentennials, and bicentennials in 1876, 1926, and 1976 eclipsed corresponding celebrations in 1787, 1937, and 1987.

Despite a recent law requiring educational institutions that receive federal funding to commemorate Constitution Week, Constitution Day still evokes less enthusiasm and pageantry than Independence Day, whose summer date helps insulate it from enforced pedagogy.

Granting priority to the event that preceded in time ("four score and seven years" prior to the Gettysburg Address) is justified if the two documents reinforce one another. The primary purposes of the two documents certainly diverged.

The Declaration of Independence sought to justify the American decision to declare independence from Britain to a watching world, and it did so in universal language. In Thomas Jefferson's language, it thus declared that "all men are created equal," that all were entitled to the rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and that all legitimate government rested on "the consent of the governed." Eleven years later, the Constitution created specific institutions to effectuate such rights for "We the People," more effectively than had the existing government under the Articles of Confederation.

I share Abraham Lincoln's view that the two documents, which shared prominent signers, are complementary. Without the kinds of institutional structures and incentives that the Constitution created, the Declaration’s assertion of equal rights would have proved to be chimerical.

In the Progressive Era, some historians joined earlier critics in arguing that the Constitution was an unnecessarily conservative reaction to an early liberal triumph, a Thermidorian reaction fueled by unwarranted fears of excessive democracy and concern for property rights. This critique has largely spent its force, and today's consensus embraces the earlier view, with perhaps a somewhat chastened understanding that neither the statesmen who met in Philadelphia in 1776 nor 1787 wore halos.

Because it is so old, it is easy to forget that our Fathers' initial reaction to the Constitution was not consensus but debate so intense that it led to the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Once the Constitution was ratified, former proponents split into rival parties who disagreed vehemently about what the document meant in key particulars.

While such debates continue into the present, most institutions that the Constitution created or affirmed -- the continuing federal division between state and national power, a unitary executive, a bicameral Congress, a judicial system with power to invalidate unconstitutional legislation, and, yes, even (in modified form) the electoral college, remain.

Some Founding Fathers would have questioned a federal law requiring teaching the Constitution on a particular week, but a majority clearly would have favored dissemination of the ideals in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

We honor the Founders' exercise of the freedom they bequeathed to their posterity when we seek to understand the documents they wrote and the institutions they devised.

John R. Vile is a professor and chairman of the Political Science Department at Middle Tennessee State University and author of "The Constitutional Convention of 1787: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of America's Founding," 2 vols. (2006).