The Story of How The Bill of Rights Came to Be: The Story of America [Ep. 13]

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories. They show where America is the star and the American people. To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app, to Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:00:26
Speaker 2: Up.

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Speaker 1: Next, another installment of our series about Us, the Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor and author of the fantastic book Land of Hope, doctor Bill McLay. Opponents of the Constitution, called anti Federalists, had serious concerns and despite their loss in stopping the Constitution, those concerns had to be heard. Let’s get into the story. Here’s Bill McLay.

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Speaker 3: Now, the anti Federalists, they were defeated in the big game of stopping the Constitution, but they were not entirely defeated. They raised really important issues. You read them now, and they’re very read. Brutus now read them. Many of them are well worth reading now in the same way the federalist papers are because they foresaw problems that we have had to face. Some of the problems of centralized government are problems we now faced. And they were concerned about the protection of rights, of fundamental rights as Englishmen. Since nothing is said about them other than a brief illusion here or there. There’s no spelling out of rights, there’s no undergirding of rights, there’s no guaranteeing of rights. So one of the compromises that was struck in the ratification was that there would be ten amendments to the Constitution. Eventually they whittled it down to ten, which we call the Bill of Rights, and quite rightly ce as part of the original Constitution, even though they are amendments. And the reason was done that way was simply that it was going to be too difficult to reassemble a constitucial convention redraft the document would open all these cans of worms that had been sealed off by the debate. So rather than do that, an agreement was struck, and the agreement was held to that the new government, once established in the first order of business, adopt these ten amendments as part of the Constitution. Many of them are really expressions of rights that were considered rights of Englishmen. Trial by jury, protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the quartering of troops. These are all things that recall the American Revolution. They’ve recalled the list of Complaints to grievances in the Declaration of Independence.

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Speaker 2: They’re directly related to that.

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Speaker 3: They are negatively liberties, which means there are protections against the government doing things. For example, freedom of religion is not declared in a positive way.

00:03:10
Speaker 2: It’s declared in a negative way.

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Speaker 3: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise. Thereof two parts to that event, and what it really says is Congress won’t establish a national church. There will be no Church of the United States, as there was a Church of England, and nothing no law that will prohibit the free exercises of religious faiths that Americans chose in their liberty. So that’s how the principal religious liberty is. That doesn’t define what a religion is, what the liberty of religion is. It takes off from the existence of a diversity of religious faiths and offers a protection to them against incursions against their rights of free expression or imposition upon them of a national church that would assume all the other churches under it, or would become the favored church of the nation and the others would be disfavored. The ninth and tenth Amendments to the Bill of Rights are important too, even though I think they’re unfortunately much neglected in current political practice. And these were designed to make the point that if something right was not in the Constitution, that was not to be taken as an indication that that right ceased to exist. One of the things that the Bill of Rights set off alarm bells for some people in the sense that, what if you had a right that you didn’t think to include in the Bill of Rights, does that mean because it’s not enumerted, that it’s no longer a right, The right of marriage, the right of having children, you know, the any number of other rights that one would assume were unaffected by the adoption of the Constitution. So the ninth and tenth Amendments are efforts to underscore the idea that the rights of the natural government are enumerated. They’re the things that are enumerated, not our rights.

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Speaker 2: Not our liveries.

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Speaker 3: The rights and powers of the national government are limited, and if the Constitution doesn’t spell them out, it should not be taken as an indication that those rights are not still operative.

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Speaker 2: So there you have it.

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Speaker 3: There you have that the not entirely clean, unmessy process by which our Constitution became law.

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Speaker 2: So what were the odds it was going to last? Even George Washington didn’t.

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Speaker 3: Expect it to last more than half a century or so. If that, Thomas Jefferson, who didn’t really care for the Constitution and didn’t have much of a role in drafting it, said, perhaps ingests, perhaps not that there ought to be a revolution, periodic revolutions to cleanse the things and open the possibility for a new way of organizing our Else he didn’t have a veneration for the Constitution, particularly so over the odds it was going to last fifty years? What was the odds that it was going to last two hundred and forty some odd years, that the odds of the American nation would be lasting for two hundred and fifty years. There was a lot of skepticism about that.

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Speaker 2: And yet it has last. It has lasted all that time.

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Speaker 3: It has endured even coming out of a process that seems very vague shift a lot of compromises I’ve been describing, and yet there’s a larger set of principles that the Constitution I think does not fail to uphold and endures. And this notion that conflict the legitimate forms of conflict that arise out of the exercise of liberty by a free people, that this conflict can be managed in a way that promotes the public good and ensure is so legitimacy of the things that government does.

00:07:07
Speaker 2: That was something the Constitution protected. But we didn’t know what it was going to look like.

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Speaker 3: We didn’t know what it was going to look like in specifics until it took effect.

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Speaker 1: When we return more of Professor Bill McLay The Story of Us the Story of America series here on our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of our American Stories. Every day we set out to tell the stories of Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities and from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to our American Stories dot com and make a donation to keep the stories coming. That’s our American Stories dot Com. And we returned to our American Stories and our Story of America series with Hillsdale College Professor Bill McLay, author of Land of Hope and a terrific Young Reader’s edition. When we last left off, Bill McLay was telling us about how the Bill of Rights were the first ten amendments to our Constitution, and well he talked about how they came to be a constitution though had not yet been tested off the paper, at least not yet. Let’s return to the story. Here again is Professor Bill McLay.

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Speaker 3: We didn’t know what it was going to look like until real human beings, flesh and blood, human beings, started to inhabit those offices that were just being described on paper. A comparison I like to use is a comparison between sheet music and real music. Now, you can have a beautiful symphony, sonata, whatever, written out in musical notation with attention to every detail, and it’s not going to amount to anything until someone sits down at the piano, or picks up the violin or the or sits down at the harp, organ whatever, and plays it, performs the music, puts it into practice. And that’s the case with the Constitution. Nobody really could know what the Constitution would look like and what some of these provisions of the Constitution would actually amount to in practice. Once you actually have the thing going and running. How easy would it be to.

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Speaker 2: Protect the rights the Constitution protects?

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Speaker 3: How easy would it be to form a government that would be conscious of its own limitations? How easy would it be to manage the conflicts.

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Speaker 2: Within that government? What was it all going to look like?

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Speaker 3: When your music starts playing, when somebody sits down and starts.

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Speaker 2: To play the notes.

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Speaker 3: The moment when that really begins is April sixth, seventeen eighty nine.

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Speaker 2: George Washington. Surprise.

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Speaker 3: What a surprise that George Washington would be the first president?

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Speaker 2: Not a surprise at all.

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Speaker 3: George Washington took the oath of office at the Federal Hall in New York City. He gave the first inaugural address, and a mighty and beautiful and meaningful address it was and is.

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Speaker 2: Let me repeat some of it for you.

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Speaker 3: I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my country can inspire. Says, There’s no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, and indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity. Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven which he capitalized, so he’s making the reference to supreme beay here we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nature that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained. And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps as deeply as fine state on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. Wow, that is an amazing sense.

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Speaker 2: It’s a rather long sense.

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Speaker 3: Let me review the points he makes, though, that there is in nature itself, in the economy and course of nature, a link between virtue and happiness. A nation that ignores virtue will sacrifice any prospect, any hope of being a happy nation. Virtue is a basis of happiness. This is an adage that again goes back to Aristotle, to one of the most consistent themes of the greatest philosophers, that virtue right conduct and a kind accord with natural law that dictates of God. This is the key to personal and collective happiness. So doing the right thing is the right road, the royal road to having the greatest felicity, the genuine maxims, he says, of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity. So you have a magnanimous policy. Magnanimous means great souls and the rewards of public prosperity. They have a great soul and wealth. These are things that go together. And then he says this at the very end of this long sentence, and this hearkens back to federalist one.

00:13:34
Speaker 2: Hearkens back to John Winthrop.

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Speaker 3: The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the Republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps.

00:13:48
Speaker 2: As deeply as finally staked on.

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Speaker 3: The experiment and trusted to the hands of the American people. So America’s an experiment. It begins Washington begins the life of the nation under the Constitution, presenting it.

00:14:05
Speaker 2: To us as an experiment.

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Speaker 3: The experiments can succeed and experiments can fail, And an experiment in this case doesn’t mean just trying any old thing. Is to see if the Constitution, a document formulated on the basis of reflection.

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Speaker 2: And choice, can be a success. Can that experiment succeed or will it fail?

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Speaker 3: And by having failed, will unfortunately seem to show to the world that it can’t be done. All this is being staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people and the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of Republican model of government. There it is liberty and self rule. To have liberty and to have the ability to rule ourselves, that idea is the heart of the Constitution, and it is this experiment that we’re entrusted with. Washington was not as eloquent as Jefferson or many others in American history, But boy did he say the thing that needed to be said when it needed to be said. He was a leader who lived his life with an acute awareness of how important every gesture, every move he made would be to the establishment of the precedence of the habits and customs, the vision of this new nation, of what the music would sound like once it was put into motion, once the keyboard was being struck, once the strings were being plucked, once the violin was being bowed, once the conductor had picked up the baton. He understood everything he did would be consequential. It made him a rather uncomfortable man, and aren’t we grateful for them?

00:15:53
Speaker 2: He couldn’t just do as he pleased. He had to think, how will this look?

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Speaker 3: What precedent was this set is watching, watching this bold new experiment, and talking about the indispensable man, George Washington, who was admired all over the world for his willingness to give up the prospect of being a king and also give up the prospect of a happy private life after having led the country through war and through the travails of the formulation of a workable constitution. But he had to see it through. The nation needed him to see it through. So he was, as his biographer called him, the indispensable Man. But still unknown was what kind of a president under this new experimental constitution would George Washington make. He’d been a great success as a military man in a variety of contexts. He was the man that the nation looked to foridential wisdom repeatedly in following its path forward. He had presided over a constitutional convention that could easily have ended up disrupting into chaos and of total failure. But now he had a new challenge. Now he had assuming a role he’d never assumed before, because nobody in the world had ever assumed it President of the United States. Everybody that came after him, he knew, would have to look back.

00:17:27
Speaker 2: To his example. So it was a fraud moment. And yet Washington has.

00:17:33
Speaker 3: Always proved to be equal to the challenge.

00:17:37
Speaker 2: We’ll see how.

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Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery The Story of America series of Hillsdale College Professor Bill McLay here on our American Story