By Michael Barone Words matter. And
nowhere is this more true than in the founding and
history of our republic. Indeed, the Founding
Fathers felt obligated to spell out their reasons
for declaring independence from England, out of what
Thomas Jefferson called a "decent respect to
the opinions of mankind." Other nations have
come into existence as realms of a monarch or
conqueror or as aggregations of people with a common
culture or language. But the United States
proclaimed its existence in words, even before it
had clearly defined borders or a formally
constituted government.
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We are a nation defined
not by blood or soil but by ideas. In an era when
university history departments have been invaded by
advocates of deconstruction and other scholarly
fashions, the typical American still longs to
understand the country's history, as evidenced
by the popularity of recent biographies of the
Founders, of television documentaries recounting
great events, of re-enactors restaging the battles
of the past.
All these bring to life events
that are difficult to imagine in a nation of air
conditioning, fast food, and theme parks. But there
is clearly a hunger to go back to the words that
define our nation. To fill that need, the National
Archives and Records Administration has compiled a
list of 100 milestone documents, drawn primarily
from papers in its custody, from Richard Henry
Lee's resolution of June 7, 1776, proposing
independence for the American colonies, to the
Voting Rights Act, signed Aug. 6, 1965. (More-recent
documents were omitted because of the difficulty of
gaining historic perspective on recent events.)
These documents are the subject of this special
issue of U.S. News.
It's not an
exaggeration to say that without these seminal
papers, our country might not exist--and certainly
would not in its current form. The government of the
United States, the most powerful government in the
history of the world, owes its existence and
structure to words, many of them written on
parchment, in longhand: the Declaration of
Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the
Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Written
constitutions were rare in the 18th century, written
bills of rights even rarer. Ours are on display in
the newly renovated National Archives building on
Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, which reopens its
doors to the public this week.
But constitutions
are not static or self-executing. Among the
archives' documents are the Judiciary Act of
1789, establishing federal courts, and the Supreme
Court's 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision,
establishing judicial review--both cornerstones of
American jurisprudence. And not all the words of
these documents still have force. The Articles of
Confederation, adopted in 1777, were superseded by
the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. Parts
of the Constitution are now defunct or superseded by
amendments. Consider that the Founders established a
republic in which the vote was limited to white
males. Those rights were only much later extended to
blacks by the 14th and 15th amendments in 1868 and
1870 and to women by the 19th Amendment in 1920.
