Constitutional Myths by Ray Raphael

drawing of George Washington book coverConstitutional Myths:What We Get Wrong and How to get it Right (2013)

Update: this book is now on my BUY list. The content is superb. The author has also written several other books in this area of American History that I will get from the library soon.

In the preface, the author describes how the  Constitution, once revered as a uniting force, has now become divisive along ideological lines. “People see in our governing document only what they wish to see. It is not a unifying force, as its authors had intended, but a wedge that widens the partisan divide.” A little bit later he makes the point that history cannot “be understood by treating the past as if it were the present. Much has happened since the founders’ time: national expansion on a shrinking planet, nuclear and biological warfare, Internet and broadcast technologies, and so on — more than two centuries of subsequent history. He gives a rather amusing anecdote to illustrate the changes.

Compare then and now. On October 15, 1789, President Washington set out from New York with only two aides and six servants to tour New England. In his diary, he chronicled the first day of the journey:

‘The road for the greater part, indeed the whole way, was very rough and stoney [sic], but the land strong, well covered with grass and a luxuriant crop of Indian corn intermixed with popions [pumpkins] which were ungathered in the fields. We met four droves of beef cattle for the New York market (about 30 in a drove) some of which were very fine — also a flock of sheep for the same place. We scarcely passes a farm house that did not abd. in geese.’

Washington was traveling through what is now THE BRONX, traversed by interstate highways and expressways, not stony roads, and home to some 1.4 million people packed tightly within apartments. If the country Washington observed was very different back then, so too was the manner in which he observed it, close up and literally on the ground, experiencing every stone in the road. He could meet his constituency directly, without intervention from an advance team, a press corps , or a small army of secret service agents.  (p. xi, emphasis mine as anyone who has ever been to the Bronx will agree)

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Showdown by Will Haygood

showdown

Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Nomination that Changed America by Will Haygood (2015)

Haygood is the author of The Butler (an excellent movie too) and this book on Thurgood Marshall is as compelling as a stimulating novel but the people are real, and even more so because they span generations in their role in our government for good or mostly I would say, ill. (Strom Thurmond, may he rest in hell, who dares to question Marshall on the topic of  “miscegenation” while he himself had started an affair with a 16 year old black girl in his household service. [can you say coercion? or statutory rape perhaps?) The bastard lived to be 100 and spent most of that time trying to stop progress, especially racial equality. (This was about 7 years after the Loving decision that ruled mixed race marriage legal.)

Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America, is a MUST READ book. Not only is it a good read, it exposes with objectivity that I would not be able to manage (anger, horror, etc. would be my view) what America was like at the time of his nomination under the Presidency of L.B. Johnson (sixties in other words). The odious Senator Sam Ervin, and other characters like Strom, are brought to life, exposing their bigotry, corporatism even then, and sheer meanness in their grilling of Marshall with arcane and irrelevant questions, topped by entrapment style “Constitution is a living document” or the words exactly and only as men from a world long ago meant them. In other words, if Marshall opted for strict constitutionalism, by which I do not think the senators even included the Bill of Rights (except obviously for the Second Amendment) as completely legitimate law, the senator would be asking Marshall to declare slavery legal again.

I would include more detail here, but I had to return the book to the library. I may check it out again after I knock off some of the other 50 or so I have piled up, and will update this page when I do get it back.

 

The Life of the Parties by A. James Reichley

The Life of the Parties: A History of American Political Parties (2000, 1992)

the life of the partiesThis link is to the 2000 edition, the one I am reading is 1992 but not as dated as one might think given that it begins at the beginning of America’s founding and all the information up to then and is extremely detailed and analyzed and described very well.

This book answers the many questions I have had over the years of how we ended up with an essentially two-party system that is run like two warring corporations for a monopoly of the United States government as the prize.

I knew that the Founding Fathers had not begun nor wanted political parties, but apparently not “until they began running parties themselves.” Thomas Jefferson was pro-party. Alexander Hamilton “associated parties with ‘ambition, avarice, personal animosity.'” I’m going to side with Hamilton on this point. James Madison “wrote in Federalist Number Ten of ‘the mischiefs of faction. John Adams expressed ‘dread’ toward ‘division of the republic into to great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other.'” Now that was prescient!

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Injustices by Ian Millhiser

book cover featuring large gavelInjustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted

I knew this was a book I wanted to read after seeing the author and Jon Stewart talk about it on The Daily Show. It exceeds my expectations in detail (lots of footnotes to love) and excellent flowing prose. Though I often kept reading because the text moved along like any good story, I found myself stopping to look up more information about people or events discussed on the Internet

Finally I just started putting bookmarks for passages to return to for rereading. A sentence on page 72 struck me in particular: “the states were, in the words of the Founding Fathers, “separately incompetent” to address the problem of children in the workplace.”

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Injustices by Ian Millhiser

book cover featuring large gavelInjustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted

I knew this was a book I wanted to read after seeing the author and Jon Stewart talk about it on The Daily Show. It exceeds my expectations in detail (lots of footnotes to love) and excellent flowing prose. Though I often kept reading because the text moved along like any good story, I found myself stopping to look up more information about people or events discussed on the Internet

Finally I just started putting bookmarks for passages to return to for rereading. A sentence on page 72 struck me in particular: “the states were, in the words of the Founding Fathers, “separately incompetent” to address the problem of children in the workplace.”

Continue reading Injustices by Ian Millhiser