This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: The American people are "both passionately engaged in their own view of the Constitution and woefully ignorant" about it, says the historian who helped develop PBS's new series "Constitution USA."
History professor Richard Beeman of the University of Pennsylvania was in St. Louis Wednesday promoting the four-part series that began airing this week. He gave these examples of popular ignorance about the document that was ratified 225 years ago:
- Only 37 percent of young people can name the three branches of government, and 71 percent think the phrase "all men are created equal" was in the Constitution, rather than the Declaration of Independence.
- Most people think the Bill of Rights was in the Constitution as written and that it was enforceable against state governments from the beginning. Actually the Bill of Rights are amendments and only were enforced against the states after passage of the 14th Amendment after the Civil War. Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire had state religions until the early 19th century.
- Most people don't realize that the original document said nothing about equality; that concept required the death of more than 600,000 men in the Civil War and the enactment of the 14th Amendment.
- People didn't refer to the first 10 amendments as the Bill of Rights until the 1940s, around the time that the Supreme Court began applying them to the states.
- The Constitution "is not primarily about rights" but rather about constructing a government to carry out the aims of the Preamble: "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty."
- Many American conservatives think the Founding Fathers wanted to create a limited government, which is only partly true because they were trying to create more centralized power to avoid the mistakes of the decentralized government created by the Articles of Confederation.
Beeman added, "The Tea Party's passion about the 'destruction of the Constitution' by our government doesn't understand the history of what they were doing" in creating more centralized power.
The PBS series focuses on how the Constitution has adapted to today's world. Beeman noted that this is consistent with the view of a "living Constitution," which is held by many liberal scholars and judges.
This notion is at odds with Justice Antonin Scalia's "originalist" view, that the Constitution is a legal text that means what the words mean when written. But Beeman said "very few constitutional scholars take it (Scalia's originalism) seriously."
Scalia has gotten so much attention for his view, Beeman added, because he is "smart, he is funny, he is good at sound bites and he doesn't hesitate to tell the Tea Party what they should say about the Constitution" even as he complains about how judges have distorted its meaning.
Beeman has found in his studies of the history of the 1780s that there is "a huge amount of ambiguity"about what the authors of the Constitution meant.
A classic case, he said, is the Second Amendment. The history is unclear whether the right to bear arms was limited to the need for a militia or whether it was a broader, individual right to have a gun.
Watch "Constitution USA" at 8 p.m., every Tuesday in May, on Channel 9.
When Beeman asks educators in workshops to name a part of the Constitution that is important to them, most name the First Amendment.
Even though the First Amendment has become the most important part of the Constitution in the popular mind, what is really most important is the "day-to-day functioning of the government, whether it is in relation to Obamacare or the fiscal cliff," he said. "It is about the enumerated powers, such as the commerce clause."
While the Declaration of Independence is written like "poetry," the Constitution "is written more like a prenuptial agreement," he said. "It's boring, but still too daring for commercial TV."
One part of the Constitution that has fallen into disuse is Congress' power to declare war. None of the wars since World War II has been declared by Congress, he noted.
Although Beeman said he loves President Barack Obama, "Obama didn't have a leg to stand on" in refusing to ask Congress to declare war in Libya. The president would have done the country a service, he said, had he gone to Congress to seek a declaration, which "he certainly would have gotten."
In the end, he added, it is up to the people to understand the Constitution and press our elected leaders to abide by it.
