A Machine That Would Go of Itself

Book Synopsis: IN HIS NEW BOOK, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen examines the cultural impact on the United States of its Constitution—its place in the public consciousness and its role as a symbol in American life—from ratification in 1788 to our own time. Exploring what the Constitution has meant to the American people (perceptions and misperceptions, uses and abuses, knowledge and ignorance), he shows that a glaring discrepancy exists between the recurrent declarations of reference for our American "Ark of the Covenant" and the fact that most of us neither know nor fully understand it. How did this gap between ideology and reality come about? To explain it, Kammen examines the complex and contradictory feelings about the Constitution that emerged during its preparation and have been with us ever since: our confusion as to the kind of Union we created, especially with regard to how much sovereignty the states actually surrendered to the central government; the development, "haltingly and incompletely," of the Constitution as a national symbol between 1789 and 1860; the major constitutional crisis of the nineteenth century: the Civil War and its aftermath; the near-failure of the attempt to organize an observance of the Centennial of the Constitution in 1887; changing perceptions of the differences and similarities between the British and American constitutions; turn-of-the-century debates about states' rights versus national authority, and about how easy or difficult it ought to be to amend the Constitution; the development of a "cult of the Constitution" following World War I, and the conflict over policy issues that persisted in spite of it; expanded awareness of constitutional problems in political and diplomatic issues that arose following World War II; gains and setbacks in civil liberties during the 1940s, '50s, and '60s; the problematic tension between the Supreme Court and the press, and the inadequate national understanding of constitutional matters that resulted. Finally, Kammen examines the critical response to Supreme Court decisions striking down various laws passed by Congress. How, he asks, can the current impulse of many Americans, on the right and the left, to reduce the Court's powers be reconciled with the faith in the value of judicial review—generally considered to be the most distinctive American contribution to Western constitutionalism. By showing that through our entire history as a nation we have had at once too much pride and too little interest in our frame of government, and by demonstrating what the cost to us has been and what the solutions to the resulting problems might be, Michael Kammen throws new and challenging light on the relation of the Constitution to the realities of American life.