Legion program tells the history of the Constitution

A small but interested audience turned out at the Big Horn Federal community room last Tuesday evening, Sept. 16, to learn about the United States Constitution.

The Constitution Day program was presented by Jim Thomas, chaplain of Robert Boyd Steward American Legion Post 11, and is part of an effort by the Legion post to educate citizens about the Constitution.

“One of the things we’ve noticed with the American Legion is that, in the world of turmoil that we live in today, people talk about constitutional rights, and most of them have no idea what’s in the Constitution. I know a lot of people who have no respect for the Constitution, and so the American Legion, in an effort to support the Constitution and maybe come up with some more interest in it so that we have a better education, we thought we’d start out with it this year with the celebration of Constitution Day.”

An exploration Constitution Day, technically September 17, on the internet finds “a cobbed-up mess,” Thomas said, with some sites calling it Citizenship Day, others Constitution Day. He said the history of the day goes back to 1911 when Iowa Public Schools started to celebrate the Constitution on September 17, marking the day in 1787 that the delegates to the constitutional convention signed the completed document in Philadelphia.

“In some of the Midwestern states, the heartland, the schools made a real effort (to teach the) Constitution,” Thomas said. “And then when it kind of started dwindling off in the ‘20s and the ‘30s and disappearing, there was another effort to make the Constitution important, and it was pushed by several larger organizations like the Sons of the American Revolution and National Security League and places like that.”

Some communities kept the educational effort up, as did William Randolph Hearst, who promoted constitutional education through his newspapers. Congress then established a special day on the third Sunday in May, with schools, during the week before or the week after that day, mandated to teach students about the Constitution on what was called I Am an American Day. President Harry S. Truman then issued a proclamation in 1946 in support of the day, proclaiming Sunday, May 19, 1946, as I Am an American Day.

Then in 1952, Congress combined Constitution Day with I Am an American Day as Citizenship Day on September 17, and it is now called either or both Citizenship Day or Constitution Day.

Constitutional convention

Thomas said the constitutional convention was held from May to September, 1787, in Philadelphia, and the delegates first believed they were gathering to amend the Articles of Confederation. There were two rules all of the delegates agreed on, Thomas said: 1) that the meetings would be held in secrecy so that all participants could say what was on their mind and 2) that a delegate could change his mind any time he wanted to.

“They could be talking about some element of the Constitution, whether we wanted a single house or two houses in Congress. And if you came back tomorrow and said, ‘You know, I heard some good stuff; I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to go over here with these guys,’ then maybe you could change it back. There was no set thing. You didn’t have to keep what you started out with. And until the last day, anything was open. It was designed to have a free flow of ideas.”

The convention was supposed to start on May 13 but didn’t get going until May 25 due to horrible travel conditions during the spring rainy season, Thomas said, adding, “It rains every day, it’s hot, it’s miserable, and it took those guys who were coming from long distances that whole extra week just to get there, because the roads were so muddy. They were doing this all on horseback and foot.”

Held during the summer in hot and humid Philadelphia, the convention was an ordeal, Thomas said.

“How did they maintain this business of everything they discussed being secret? Shut the doors, probably they did,” he said. “They shut the windows, they shut the doors and got hot, very hot. And so then they sat and they argued about what was going on and what they wanted the Constitution to look like. And there were all sorts of plans. There were single house plans, some wanted to follow exactly what England was doing.

“The single house plan involved every state having a certain number of delegates, and that was it. … Some of the states, like Virginia, didn’t really care for that, and so they thought, ‘well, we need to be doing it by population,’ and after they got done with all their discussions, they came up with what we now have as a House of Representatives.”

Thomas quizzed the audience:

• How many of the 13 colonies sent delegates? Answer: 12.

“Rhode Island didn’t send anybody,” Thomas said. “They didn’t feel that they needed to have any change to what’s been going on. ‘We are fine, just the way we are.’ And so Rhode Island did not send anyone; we actually only had 12 of the colonies that showed up for this convention.”

• How many delegates attended? Answer: 55.

• How many delegates actually signed the Constitution? Answer: 39.

“Some of them were so put out with the arguments and fighting that was going on, they left early,” Thomas said.

• What was the key factor to, in 116 days, creating a document everyone could live by? Answer: Compromise.

“It’s a word that we have failed to keep in our society,” Thomas said. “We don’t see that anymore. If a rule comes up, then it gets to go to lawsuits for the next five years. I mean, there’s no compromise. That’s where the Great Compromise came from, where we ended up with a two-house system, one based on population, one based on straight across two delegates for everybody, and they have to agree in a process. And if they don’t agree, then it’s go back and try to do it some more. But during the what eventually became known as a constitutional convention was full of compromise.”

Thomas told an interesting story about proofreading the Constitution. He said one delegate was tasked with carefully going over the document and looking for errors like punctuation and spelling, but he made one unilateral change that resonates today. The original preamble started “We, the People of the States of (Virginia and Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and all the others listed), but the proofreader changed the preamble to “We, the People of the United States,” and the change stuck.

“I think that was probably one of the most significant changes that we could have come up with,” Thomas said.

He added that one delegate did not sign the Constitution because he couldn’t make up his mind.

• What was the last state to ratify the Constitution? Answer: Rhode Island, on May 29, 1790.