The Ark of America

(2 of 8)

Celebrations of the Constitution are inherently different in any case. The bunting and period costumes are accompanied this time by processions of scholars, by seminars on Public Television, by a different public mood. The Constitution is more complex than a Fourth of July, more technical, more cerebral and, in its intricacies, subtleties and silences, even enigmatic. A Fourth of July is fireworks and rhetoric, the old ritual romance of liberty. The Constitution is thought and legalism.

A few weeks ago, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall objected to some of the pietism attending the 200th anniversary of the Constitution. Speaking to a lawyers' group in Hawaii, Marshall said the document had been "defective from the start." The fact that Marshall is the great-grandson of a slave sharpened his point.

"I do not believe," Marshall went on, "that the meaning of the Constitution was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia convention." The document required "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."

In 1919 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, "Our Constitution is an experiment, as all life is an experiment." The Constitution is an experiment as the U.S. is an experiment. It was flawed from the beginning as the nation was flawed. But the Constitution has also been the genius of America, the life of its laws and the conscience of its power. The Constitution and the country formed each other. The genius lay in the hermeneutical life of the document, the complicated, brilliant, sometimes disgraceful unfolding of America.

In retrospect, Americans have often believed that their nation was inevitable. It did not seem so at the start. The 13 colonies that fought the Revolution had formed a loose confederation, a flimsy arrangement, each state in business for itself, guarding its sovereignty. By 1785 it looked as if the arrangement would disintegrate, that the colonies would at best turn into separate national entities connected only by more or less friendly treaties with one another.

The founders meeting in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 invented a true U.S. Ever since, the country has gone on inventing and reinventing itself -- the Constitution shaping the nation, a changing America rethinking the Constitution. The one time the Constitution proved inadequate to the task, in the 1860s, half a million died in order to improve the document. The Civil War amounted to a Second Constitutional Convention.

The U.S. as a nation is famously lucky. Its primal luck was geography and timing: a wild natural abundance that was encountered by gifted men and women in the clear rational blue of the Enlightenment. The Constitution was drafted in a moment of ascendant science -- political science preached by Locke and Montesquieu, for example -- and belief in the power of reason to subdue the savage and ignorant regions of the mind.