The Ark of America

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A few generations after the Constitutional Convention, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his essay History, with one of his lines of crystal meditation: "It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope and wallow like dogs." The founders of 1787 knew all about the moping dogs. They designed their instrument to break out of the dark alternations of anarchy and tyranny, to manage power and preserve freedom.

Philadelphia 200 years ago was the real morning in America. In the beginning were the words, and they were made flesh -- Presidents, Senators, Justices. The imagery of creation and divine sponsorship hovered over the enterprise. As Lincoln said at Gettysburg, the U.S. was a new nation, "brought forth" and dedicated to a proposition, an idea. America was not a pre-existing cohesion, like Japan, which had its origins back in the Shinto mists of its prehistory. America was a conscious creation of the mind, of science. It was creatively assembled out of ideas, traditions and genes rounded up elsewhere and unloaded in a New World.

Most of history is passivity, or lashing reaction. The Constitution represented a wonderfully energetic and active moment, the mind alive and assertive, yet amazingly self-knowing. The founders created government as an exquisite system of self-control and self-examination. The Constitution is, among other things, the model of a fine 18th century mind, with checks and balances that are both delicate and strong, a splendid mind that designed into itself the mechanisms of civilized change. As W.H. Auden once said, Americans are great moral improvisers.

The founders were elitists, and realists about human nature, a configuration stamped upon the document they wrote. Their task was to make passion subject to reason. If men could be expected to be selfish, or worse, then, said James Madison, "ambition must be made to counteract ambition." The Newtonian principles of action and reaction were applied to politics. The founders mistrusted human nature (not a bad call) but harbored great ambitions for mankind nonetheless.

The U.S. owes much to the patriarchal authority of its Constitution. Its citizens have almost always believed that men may be wrong (transient politicians, bigots, mortal fools temporarily in power), but that the Constitution is the repository of truth, if only citizens are wise enough to discover it. Is it constitutional? It is moving that the question is asked so often in America, so seriously, so indignantly, so hopefully. The asker may be angry but nonetheless believes he has knocked at the door where justice lives. (Justice, of course, is not invariably at home.)

The 7,567 words of the Constitution and amendments, mostly dry and functional prose, are sometimes cryptic and elusive, and Americans have suggested a variety of similes and metaphors to describe the document. In the early 19th century, a Congressman named Caleb Cushing hinted at the Constitution's divine inspiration when he called it "our Ark of Covenant." (Abolitionists a little later called it the handiwork of Satan.)