CHAPTER ]1
The Problem of Constitutionalism
in American Culture
ALTHOUGH THE FOUNDERS DIFFERED OVER MANY important matters，
they shared a belief that the constitutional system created between I787
and I79I (when the Bill of Rights received approval) should be fully
comprehensible to the American people. At the close of his first inaugu-
ral address Thomas Jefferson called the Constitution \"the text of civil in-
struction-the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust.\"
That is， those entrusted with responsibility for public affairs. More re-
cently Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts， writing in I93o， observed that
\"the Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words
and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from
[their] technical meaning ，，1
The recurrence of such assertions obliges us to raise this candid
question: To what extent has our constitutional system， in reality， served
as a text of civil instruction? I contend that the Constitution occupies an
anomalous role in American cultural history. For almost two centuries it
has been swathed in pride yet obscured by indifference: a fulsome rhetoric
of reverence more than offset by the reality of ignorance. One American
woman， while travelling abroad in t 840， heaped lavish praise upon \"our
own glorious Constitution (whose every article should be held as sacred and
unchangeable as were the laws of the Persian and the Mede).\" School-
books of that era often stated that the Constitution had been divinely in-
spired. Their authors could not refer to ~e Constitution without a choral
vocabulary of \"revered， glorious，\" and \"sacred. 2
Those very same schoolbooks， however， also contained all sorts of
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