History for "We the People"

To say that the United States is a story is not to say that it is fiction; it is, instead, to suggest that it follows certain narrative conventions. All nations are places, but they are also acts of imagination. Who has a part in a nation’s story, like who can become a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn’t foreordained, or even stable. The story’s plot, like the nation’s borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting. Laws are passed and wars are fought to keep some people in and others out. Who tells the story, like who writes the laws and who wages the wars, is always part of that struggle. — Jill Lepore

It’s important for us to remember, in this era of vocal constitutional “originalists,” that the Founders never foresaw many things we now consider inevitable—such as universal suffrage, to take an obvious example. After all, as [Jill] Lepore reminds us, the now-hallowed word “democracy” was actually considered a slur until the advent of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s, and democracy’s rise “was neither inevitable nor swift. It countered prevailing political philosophy. If democracy is rule by the people and if the people are, as Federalists like John Adams believed, ‘the common Herd of Mankind’—the phrase was a commonplace—then democracy is the government of the worst, the tyranny of the idle, the ignorant, the ill informed.” For a century and a half, it has been the done thing to deride this theory as reactionary and to poke fun at Adams as a relic of monarchism. From the vantage point of the 21st century, however, as we observe the fruits of 200 years of Jacksonian democracy in both our elected government and our national discourse, one is tempted to give Adams credit for a little more sense on the subject than he normally gets.

All evidence to the contrary, we continue to believe, deep in our hearts, that the Founders’ “We the People” meant all the people, not just the propertied white men. We also seem to believe that the act of voting was always an inalienable right, justly administered—hence our righteous outrage when innovations such as the Diebold voting machine or, currently, the South Carolina Voter ID law are introduced. Lepore’s fascinating essay “Rock, Paper, Scissors” puts the voting booth into historical perspective, demonstrating that we don’t know nearly as much as we think we do about our political institutions. In the early years of the Republic, voters had to write their own ballots, and the potential for manipulation, intimidation, and falsification was enormous…A travesty, yes, but the method by which it was eventually improved turned out to be a mixed blessing at best. Political parties stepped into the breach by printing ballots in partisan newspapers (all early American newspapers were openly partisan) that came to be called “party tickets,” and listed the entire slate of candidates for their favored party. For the voter, there was no need to know how to write—or to read, for that matter. This innovation facilitated the rise of the major parties (thus limiting voters’ choices) and led to “massive fraud, corruption, and intimidation.”