A Nation Is a Living Thing

During the presidential campaign for the 1912 election, Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat, addressed America’s anxieties about looking to the past for inspiration in his book The New Freedom. He began by claiming, “The laws of this country have not kept up with the change of political circumstances in this country.” “The government, which was designed for the people,” he continued, “has got into the hands of bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.” He pointed out that “our laws are still meant for business done by individuals; they have not been satisfactorily adjusted to business done by [corporations].” When circumstances changed, Wilson argued, the government and its laws must change with it. 

He directed his ire at conservatives in both parties who preached what he called “do-nothingism” out of “fear that we are now about to disturb the ancient foundations of our institutions.” To argue that the government could change while still retaining the character of its institutions, he turned to the Revolution. The founders who drew up the Constitution lived in an intellectual world defined by Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, he said, and so they spoke of the Constitution as a machine, with its mechanical language of checks and balances. But the new intellectual world of the modern 20th century was defined by Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. Instead of being a machine, society was a living organism that constantly evolved. “All that progressives ask or desire is permission … to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.” With this metaphor, progressives argued that a nation needed a “living Constitution” to achieve progress. 

Wilson also set his sights on the Declaration. “Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence,” he declared. “Their bosoms swell against George III, but they have no consciousness of the war for freedom that is going on today.” Besides, “the Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day. It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day.” Earlier, on July 4, 1907, Wilson had dramatically told an audience, “We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence; we are as free as they were to make and unmake governments. We are not here to worship men or a document. Every Fourth of July should be a time for … determining afresh what principles, what forms of power we think most likely to effect our safety and happiness. That and that alone is the obligation the Declaration lays upon us.”

For Wilson, Americans who believed in the unerring nature of the Revolution, its founders, and its institutions were merely burying themselves in the past to avoid having to fix the problems of the present. Neither the Declaration nor the Constitution held clear answers for resolving the challenges of the early 20h century, he argued. Nevertheless, he assured his audience that real progress meant addressing those challenges within the institutional structures that already existed and did not require tearing down the entire system, as many socialists proposed.

The simultaneous rise of both immigration and socialism fostered a growing sense that American ideals and institutions were under threat. But socialists in the early 20th century asserted their own claims on the revolutionary legacy. In 1901, Eugene Debs, the nation’s most prominent native-born socialist, gave an Independence Day oration at St. Louis where he criticized the founders for their compromise over “the insufferable institution of chattel slavery” and for having had “no faith in the people.” But he also said, “I like the Fourth of July. It breathes a spirit of revolution.” Even if socialists such as Debs found much to criticize in the legacy of the Revolution, they also saw political value in the nation having had revolutionary origins. When he spoke at the 1904 Socialist Party convention, he received great applause when he said that “if [Jefferson and Lincoln] were living today, they would be delegates to this convention.”

In a 1920 issue of the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, Kate Richards O’Hare, an antiwar socialist who was jailed for dissent, wrote, “We honor George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry because they are Revolutionists. Because they were Red to the bottom of their souls and ready to fight and die, if necessary, for liberty, social justice and human brotherhood. Of course it would be a shocking thing if a school teacher in this town ever told the simple truth that Patrick Henry was a sort of I.W.W.; George Washington, from a loyalist point of view, a Bolshevik, and Thomas Jefferson, a Socialist.” Like many other groups in American political life, they knew the political value of being able to convince others that, were they still here, the founders — whom they called “those good old Reds of 1776” — would be on their side. Socialists, trying to push back against the increasing rhetoric from conservatives that identified them with foreigners and the founders with capitalism, stressed their own commitment to the Revolution’s “great ideals and eternal principles,” namely equality.

Nevertheless, many Americans came to see socialism as distinctly un-American, not least because the membership in various socialist parties in the 1900s and 1910s consisted largely of recent immigrants. In 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia raised the stakes even higher, both for middle-class Americans anxious over the growing number of poor immigrants and for upper-class Americans worried that popular discontent could lead to the end of American capitalism and the class structure that kept them at the top. If Bolshevism could topple an ancient feudal empire in Russia, they reasoned, it could certainly topple a young capitalist republic. Many worried that immigration was serving as a Trojan horse for radical European Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, a growing popularity of pseudoscientific ideas about racial hierarchies reinforced the rampant nativism and antiimmigrant sentiment of the 1910s and 1920s. 

Since its start in 1891, the Daughters of the American Revolution had been concerned that the United States was being “denationalized by Hungarians, Poles, and Italians who have never read the first letter of the spirit of Americanism.” By the 1910s, local DAR chapters had already spent two decades trying to assimilate immigrants by teaching and promoting their own interpretation of the principles of the Revolution. But as immigration increased, the national organization became more antiradical. In 1906 it stepped up its efforts “to educate and qualify the coming hordes for assimilation into the American type” by creating a national Committee on Patriotic Education.

The committee organized lectures and evening classes that introduced immigrants to the nation’s history, laws, and government, sometimes in their native languages. It distributed preapproved sets of slides and other educational materials nationally. These efforts reached many immigrants across the country who hoped to assimilate and become American, while others did it out of prudence or necessity. The DAR also hosted patriotic clubs called Children of the Republic to teach immigrant boys and girls “a high standard of civic honor and patriotic citizenship.” Teaching them “American values” and their importance might make them less likely to grow up to become radical socialists. According to the DAR, immigrants needed to learn to appreciate the inheritance of the Revolution, which was not just a set of ideas but a “way of life” they called “Americanism.” The organization defined this term in part by a commitment to the Constitution, the rule of law, and an appreciation for the nation’s revolutionary heritage, of which the DAR was the self-anointed keeper. 

Political and economic elites worried after World War I that the country was heading down a dangerous path. Many Americans were losing their faith in the recently coined “American Dream.” Progressives had extended populists’ cynicism regarding the political system back to its origins, namely the Constitution. In their view, the system had not just become rotten over time; it had been rotten to the core from the very beginning. Many had come to believe that the Constitution did not truly represent the will of “We the People,” as they had long been told. Rather, it represented a counterrevolution, a reactionary betrayal of the Revolution. The Constitution, in their telling, had allowed wealthy elites to seize power from the democratic state legislatures and impose a powerful, centralized government that seemed to be the very antithesis of what ordinary Americans thought they were fighting for in 1776. 

After the relatively recent history of radical Republicans’ Reconstruction amendments and the upholding of antitrust law to regulate monopolies, conservatives in the early 20th century reasserted their ownership of the Constitution with a renewed enthusiasm. In 1921, the New York Times noted, “If it is true, as there is much evidence to prove, that Americans are showing themselves the most conservative nation in a turbulent world, the largest cause of it lies in our Federal Constitution.” Sounding much like Southerners in the 1850s, conservative commentators praised the Constitution’s “powerful restraints on democracy.” They began to fear that if enough people came to feel that the nation’s origins were corrupt, the failure of the country itself would become inevitable. They worried that too many aspects of the modern world were diluting the revolutionary ideals that defined what it meant to be an American. Their brand of Americanism was characterized by an appreciation for the past and opposition to both government intervention and political and economic reform. 

All these factors gave rise to a renewed brand of constitutional conservatism that helped create the distinctly modern popular memory of the Constitution. This conservatism was built on the belief that the first principle of the Constitution (and, by extension, the Revolution) was “limited government.” It was based on the narrative that the patriots rebelled primarily because of their opposition to Britain’s distant, powerful, and active centralized government. In this memory, the Constitution was intended to create a small, inactive, and limited government. This characterization of the Constitution and the Revolution gained popularity among conservatives in the 1910s and 1920s in response to the rise of progressivism, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, opposition to President Wilson’s wartime price controls, and the Red Scare in the United States.

Organizations from the DAR to conservative legal societies promoted the notion that the founders at the Constitutional Convention intended to create a limited government, an interpretation that contrasted usefully with progressivism and Bolshevism. Of course this rhetoric failed to consider that the convention’s purpose was clearly to create a more powerful government than that of the existing Articles of Confederation. But conservatives in the early 20th century played on the particular emotional attachment many Americans had to the Revolution. They claimed that progressives’ questioning of tradition and their criticism of the Constitution were insults to the memory of the Revolution. In 1919, the National Association for Constitutional Government allied with the DAR and other patriotic organizations to create Constitution Day, an annual holiday each September 17 to mark the day the Constitutional Convention concluded in 1787. Constitution Day celebrations quickly became commonplace in the 1920s; both the American Bar Association and the National Education Association promoted an extended Constitution Week. By 1930 nearly all the states had passed new laws requiring public school students to learn about the Constitution.

One of the biggest boosters of this revival of the Constitution after the end of the Progressive Era was the recently resurrected Ku Klux Klan. Unlike the original organization, which was relatively small in numbers and primarily Southern, by 1925 the new organization boasted five million members from across the country, including many non-Southerners wary of Catholic immigrants and the beginning of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South into Northern cities. In September of that year, the organization’s periodical the American Standard celebrated Constitution Day. Reflecting its anti-Catholicism, the publication explicitly tied the Revolution to Protestant Christianity: “When Washington and his great colleagues put into written form the immortal principles of liberty, popular government, and equal justice … they forged a weapon against Roman Catholicism.” In their telling, the founders “inscribed upon the eternal tablets of history the God-inspired provisions of our Federal Constitution, whose principles they derived from the teachings of the Holy Bible.” The issue included an editorial entitled “God and the Constitution” that claimed to give “a complete answer to the question, Are we a Christian nation?” Unsurprisingly, their answer was yes. Of course, when the Ku Klux Klan described a “Christian nation,” they excluded all non-Protestant, nonwhite Americans, including the recent waves of Catholic immigrants, who they claimed were part of a coordinated plan by the Pope to undermine the United States. The Ku Klux Klan — like Southern slaveholders in the antebellum period who had seen the Constitution as their most powerful tool for protecting slavery — believed the combination of a federal government strictly limited by the Constitution along with targeted political violence could help resist racial integration and both religious and ethnic diversity. 

The Klan, however, was neither first nor alone in their convictions about the relationship between religion and the Revolution. Even in the 19th century, evangelicals had believed, like many 19th-century historians, that the history of the United States had been guided by divine providence. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints took it a step further. For Mormons, the Constitution itself had been a direct product of divine inspiration. In a revelation given to church founder Joseph Smith at Kirtland, Ohio, in December 1833, God told him, “I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I have raised up unto this very purpose.” As a result, Smith called the document “a heavenly banner.” In 1898 Wilford Woodruff, the current president of the Mormon Church, testified before his general conference to having been visited two nights in a row by the spirits of George Washington and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, whom he called “the best spirits the God of Heaven could find on the face of the earth.” In the early 20th century, some devout evangelicals were coming to share this belief that the actual writing of the Constitution had been “divinely inspired” and therefore it served as the nation’s “holy of holies, an instrument of sacred import.”

The idea of a divinely inspired Constitution had become common enough among some Americans by the 1920s that a few prominent legal scholars felt compelled to counter these perceptions at length. In 1923 Thomas Reed Powell, a professor of law at Harvard, wrote in the New Republic about “the mystical adulation of the Constitution in the pious faith that it contains in itself the saving grace that will shield the interests of the worshippers from the ambitions of those whose interests are adverse.” “Self-styled patriotic societies,” he continued, “have spent themselves lavishly in expounding the gospel according to Mammon and identifying it with the parchment that came from Philadelphia.” In other words, Powell saw distinctly political interests behind these religious beliefs. Howard Lee McBain, a professor of constitutional law at Columbia University, reminded the public that “the constitution of the United States was not handed down on Mount Sinai by the Lord God of Hosts. It is not to be worshipped.” In his 1927 book The Written Constitution and the Unwritten Attitude, Charles Merriam incisively assessed this approach to the Constitution: “Those who worship the text, worship in reality their own attitudes which they fondly hope the interpretation of the text may produce.” This conservative inclination to celebrate or “worship” the founding in the early 20th century contrasted with progressives’ critical and utilitarian approach to the Revolution, and these two conflicting approaches would continue — with some slight modifications — throughout the 20th century. 

Excerpt adapted from The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History by Michael D. Hattem. Copyright © 2024 by Michael D. Hattem. Used with the permission of Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

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