The fragility of our constitutional form of government is the message I get from today’s #stampoftheday. A 3-cent stamp, issued on September 17, 1937, it commemorates the 150th anniversary (or the sesquicentennial) of the Constitutional Convention’s vote to approve the proposed US Constitution on September 17, 1787. The proposed constitution, which the delegates had been discussing for about four months, was supported by 39 of the 55 delegates who came from 12 states. (Rhode Island didn’t send a representative because it didn’t want a national government.)

The Constitution’s framers were aware that they had a difficult task. As its backers wrote in one of the Federalist Papers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

As many wise and thoughtful people have noted, their efforts to address these challenges were imperfect at best. On the one hand, the Constitution has provided a durable framework for American governance that has lasted for more than 200 years. On the other hand, it is a deeply flawed document that allowed for slavery, only gave rights to white, male landholders, created a legislative body (the U.S. Senate) in which about 70 percent of the nation’s residents will soon be represented by 30 percent of the legislators, and established a presidential election system that also stacks the deck against the residents of the nation’s most populous states. And, of course, it relies on a balance of powers among three branches willing to both use their powers and to respect the limits on those powers, two conditions that currently are teetering if not already missing.

While the men who wrote and approved this system knew that what they had crafted was imperfect, they also decided it was good enough. Benjamin Franklin, for example, noted in his final speech before the Constitutional Convention: “When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.” Therefore Franklin “thought it impossible to expect a ‘perfect production’ from such a gathering,” wrote historian Richard Beeman in a 1998 essay posted on the National Constitution Center website. However, “he believed that the Constitution they had just drafted, ‘with all its faults,’ was better than any alternative that was likely to emerge.” Beeman added that nearly all of the delegates harbored similar objections, but like Franklin, “they put aside their misgivings and affixed their signatures to it” even though “they had not yet worked out fully the question that has plagued all nations aspiring to democratic government ever since: how to implement principles of popular majority rule while at the same time preserving stable governments that protect the rights and liberties of all citizens.”

Franklin, for one, thought the new system got off to a good start, writing, in a 1789 letter near the end of his life, that “our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” And, over time, Americans have made the system work, in part by using the Constitutional amendment process to extend the rights offered by the original document to many of the people excluded from the original document.
“On the other hand,” Beeman wrote, “the challenges to national unity under our Constitution are, if anything, far greater than those confronting the infant nation in 1787. Although the new nation was a pluralistic one by the standards of the 18th century, the face of America…looks very different from the original: we are no longer a people united by a common language, religion or culture; and while our overall level of material prosperity is staggering by the standards of any age, the widening gulf between rich and poor is perhaps the most serious threat to a common definition of the ‘pursuit of happiness.'” (If anything, these issues are even more pressing today than when Beeman wrote those words in 1998.)

Nevertheless, Beeman was optimistic, writing: “If there is a lesson in all of this it is that our Constitution is neither a self-actuating nor a self-correcting document. It requires the constant attention and devotion of all citizens. There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’ The brevity of that response should not cause us to under-value its essential meaning: democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people for their continued good health.”
Like many people I am upset and scared by the many attacks on our system and concerned about our continued failure to address the many problems created by what Isabel Wilkerson calls (correctly in my view) a longstanding racially based caste system in the United States. But, I am a skeptical optimist (or maybe I’m an optimistic skeptic). So despite of it all, I am hopeful that the current surge of “active and informed involvement” by many like-minded people will help ensure “the continued good health” of our democratic republic.

Be well, stay safe, and be informed and actively involved in the fight for justice and keep working for peace.