A Work Still in Progress
By LINDA GREENHOUSE - New York Times
When the country observed the Constitution’s 200th anniversary back in 1987, two narratives vied for public acceptance. There was the triumphalist narrative celebrated in Philadelphia, where a quarter-million people took part in a 15-hour-long gala, lining the route for a parade with floats that included a 40-foot replica of a parchment scroll.
It was Sept. 17, Warren E. Burger’s 80th birthday, and it was his special day in more ways than one. He had retired as chief justice of the United States a year earlier in order to preside over the bicentennial observance. “Keeping faith with the vision of the founders” was the goal he summoned in his Philadelphia speech. At 4 p.m., the hour when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the document, the retired chief justice rang a replica of the Liberty Bell. Across the time zones, bells were rung at that moment in cities and towns around the country and at American diplomatic missions and military bases throughout the world.
The festivities almost, but not quite, drowned out the competing narrative, a more sober assessment of the anniversary’s meaning that Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to serve on the court, had offered a few months earlier, far from Philadelphia, at a bar meeting in Hawaii.
“The focus of this celebration invites a complacent belief that the vision of those who debated and compromised in Philadelphia yielded the ‘more perfect Union’ it is said we now enjoy,” the aging justice and hero of the civil rights movement declared, adding, “I cannot accept this invitation.” The nation the framers established, he went on, “was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today.”
The anniversary didn’t merit “flag-waving fervor,” he said. Rather, the proper way to mark the day would be to “quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document, and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled.” Lacking that perspective, Justice Marshall concluded, “the odds are that for many Americans the bicentennial celebration will be little more than a blind pilgrimage to the shrine of the original document now stored in a vault at the National Archives.”
I thought of the two justices and their competing narratives when I stopped by the National Archives last week to see its new permanent exhibit, “Records of Rights.” I was intrigued by what I read about the exhibit, which opened Dec. 10 in the new David M. Rubenstein Gallery. Some critical commentary had suggested that the exhibit wasn’t celebratory enough, that the story it told placed undue emphasis on the flaws in the original design and the subsequent lapses in bringing the country’s promises to fruition. Could it be, I wondered, that this national “shrine,” in Thurgood Marshall’s description, had actually embraced his nuanced and hard-earned vision rather than the “flag-waving fervor” that the critics seemed to have expected? In Washington on other business, and with some time on my hands, I decided to see for myself.
I’m happy to report that the exhibit presents, through a few hundred documents chosen from the billions in the archives’ collection, the story of constitutional rights as an unfinished journey, an “ongoing struggle,” in the words of one of the wall labels near the entrance. There is much here that goes beyond the obvious. The display is subtle and sophisticated, documenting, as an early label says, “the expansion -- and sometimes the retraction -- of our rights.”
In one display case is a huge open book containing a handwritten draft of the congressional joint resolution that proposed the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. The curators’ commentary accurately notes that it was not until the 1960s “and beyond” that the amendment’s promises of due process and equal protection began to be fulfilled. A section on voting rights celebrates the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which prohibits denying the right to vote on account of race, and the passage 95 years later of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to enforce the amendment’s guarantee. And yes, the commentary also notes that on June 25 of this year, the Supreme Court declared Section 4 of the act unconstitutional.
The inspiration for this exhibit came from the arrival a few years ago of a rare 1297 copy of Magna Carta, which the generous financier David M. Rubenstein bought at auction for $21.3 million (the previous owner was Ross Perot) and gave to the archives on long-term loan. As the repository for the founding documents of the United States, the National Archives doesn’t leap to mind as a natural home for this quintessentially English treasure.
So the effort was to place Magna Carta in an American context as a charter of fundamental rights (or, one might say, the rights of 13th-century English barons) known to have inspired this country’s founding fathers. The Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process, the exhibit informs us, is a “direct descendant” of Magna Carta’s declaration, “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice.”
Having decided to construct a fully American exhibit around Magna Carta, it was obvious to the archives staff that the story had to be an evolutionary one. Alice Kamps, one of the five in-house curators who put the exhibit together under the direction of the archivist, David S. Ferriero, explained this to me when I called the archives after my visit. Magna Carta was written by and for “landed barons, noblemen who were a very small part of the population,” Ms. Kamps said, and by the same token, it was only “white, property-owning Americans” who fully enjoyed the rights granted by the new Constitution. The goal of the exhibit, she explained, was to show how people have used law to claim rights, and also to show the conflict that these claims engendered along the way. Evolution, the exhibit demonstrates, has not been a straight-line progression. The curators see the story as “inspiring, not discouraging,” Ms. Kamps said.
The exhibit makes good use of technology, with a long, table-height touch-screen that permits people to dig deeper into the archives’ collections on the topics covered. But there’s nothing like seeing an original document. Those on display are wonderfully eclectic, varied enough to offer different gee-whiz moments to different visitors. Here were mine:
From the women’s rights section -- a pamphlet put out by the War Department in 1943, urging employers to hire women to fill employee ranks depleted of men. These were the inducements that this government pamphlet described:
“Women are pliant -- adaptable.”
“Women are dexterous -- finger-nimble.”
“Women are good at repetitive tasks.”
“Women can be trained to do almost any job you’ve got.”
The security guard standing nearby looked up when I laughed out loud, her face a stoic mask.
In the fascinating section on immigration, which chronicles how immigrants have been alternately welcomed, exploited, admired and despised, there is a newsletter published in one of the Pacific Northwest detention camps in which Japanese-Americans were confined during World War II. The “news” reported in the June 5, 1942, edition of the “Evacuazette” was breathtaking in its banality, but at the same time deeply touching in its effort to claim some semblance of normal community life: a screening of the movie “Sun Valley Serenade” had to be postponed because of a faulty projector.
Finally, again in the women’s rights section, there is a draft of the bill that became Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the foundational federal law that prohibits employment discrimination. As originally introduced, the bill referred to race and religion, but said nothing about sex. Famously, a conservative Virginia Democrat, Rep. Howard W. Smith, chairman of the House Rules Committee, added sex to the list of protected categories as an amendment from the floor. The copy in the exhibit shows, in Mr. Smith’s handwriting, the notation “after the word religion insert the word sex.” The commentary explains that “historians still debate his motives.”
Oh no, they don’t, I said to myself. The received wisdom, at least as I always heard it, was that the congressman, no friend of civil rights, added sex as a poison pill, a killer amendment by which he hoped to sink the whole enterprise. I made myself a note to do some research on this point when I got home. To my surprise, I found several articles in the academic literature that cast doubt on the conventional wisdom and plausibly made Mr. Smith’s motives out to be at least ambiguous. So I learned something -- as will anyone who visits this complex and engaging exhibit. I’m not sure what Chief Justice Burger would have made of it. But I think Justice Marshall would have come away satisfied. Flag-waving and bell-ringing can grow old, but the Constitution as a work in progress is, and will remain, a story worth telling.
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