This month's museum pick...

The National Constitution Center; It Matters!

by Dea Adria Mallin

“The only title in our democracy superior to that of President is the title of Citizen.”
                                                                 Judge Louis Brandeis, 1937    

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”
                                                                     Judge Learned Hand, 1944

Situated in America’s most historic square mile in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historic Park, along with Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, is the National Constitution Center. Created by an Act of Congress, it is the first and only museum dedicated to the United States Constitution and to the message that constitutional democracy demands participation.

Ground was broken on September 17, 2000 – 213 years to the day since the United States Constitution was signed. It opened to the public on July 4, 2003. And not a moment too soon. Since the beginning of a war against an abstraction, declared by the 43rd U.S. President against Iraq, it has become increasingly important to understand what is meant by “the rule of law,” the particular powers of the executive, judicial, and legislative branches, the stake we have in First Amendment principles, issues of domestic surveillance, the real meaning of “We, the People…” and ultimately, the question of how shall we live both safe and free?    

As a college professor, I am often struck that my students these days can take or leave the upheavals of their teachers’ generation – our  civil rights marches on Washington, our fight for women’s rights, our protests against the Vietnam war. What a diffident attitude many of these young men and women have, born and raised in a time of continuous affluence with the instant gratification, if not anaesthetization, of fast food, Ipod, TV remote, Internet, and Blockbuster movies. Should I be perplexed that my students have never heard that a democracy needs “eternal vigilance”?

Surely it is in order for my students and for all Americans to awaken to the understanding of themselves as a force in the life of the Constitution, and to have this vibrant National Constitution Center to prompt citizens of all ages to ask questions and to thoughtfully forge answers about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and the blessings of liberty.

This is a spirited museum that is far more than a place to house artifacts; it is all about people and ideas. It is a site of both permanent and revolving exhibitions, a center with complex educational content and more than 100 intensely interactive multimedia exhibits, film, photographs, text, sculpture, and theater; it is a non-partisan forum for national debate on Constitutional  issues; it is a study center and a hub for education and outreach; it is a partner in NPR’s ”Justice Talking”; it is home to the Peter Jennings Institute for Journalists and the Constitution, the National Teacher Institutes, and a Visiting Scholars program where top legal and academic minds share worlds with the general public. The designers wanted to “revive wonder at our American enterprise, this adventure of personal expression and political debate,” and so they have.    

When I enter the Center, I am in a vast circular space comprised of 85,000 square feet of Indiana limestone, 2.6 million pounds of steel, and a half-million cubic feet of concrete, all made in America. Here are two city blocks worth of space, in three concentric rings,  where each beginning leads to a culmination and then the story begins again. 

The outermost ring, wrapped by a high glass wall on which the text of the Constitution is illuminated, is chronological and tells the constitutional story from 1765 until today, a work-in-progress rather than a dead artifact, a celebration of the millions of individual actions that have upheld and shaped our constitutional practices and freedoms. There are videos, reading rails, maps and images, and computer interactives. The entry point is the human story, told in the present tense in a reporter’s voice. You can hear Sojourner Truth’s speech in 1851, watch a mini-documentary of the Kennedy assassination, and sit on the Senate floor during the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson.

The central ring is thematic, examining the playing out of the Constitution. At a replica of the Supreme Court bench, listen to the judges delivering their arguments and try on the judge’s robe. Close the curtain around you and vote in a booth. Serve on a jury.

The innermost gallery ring prompts the visitor to sit down, get informed, and enter the conversation via a groundbreaking computer program. 

I have my Delegate Pass in hand for the nuanced introductory multimedia production, “Freedom Rising.” Here, one powerful live actor, 360-degree projection, theatrical lighting, a dynamic surround soundtrack, and a few surprises await me. Before the performance begins, I am aware of the Constitution on the glass periphery, writ large, and that there are animated voices from the past, discussing, arguing, agreeing and disagreeing. This is a sound that will follow me almost everywhere in the museum. The voices of the people. We, the people. Me, part of the people. I want my voice to be heard, but first, I must hear what they are saying, ask why they are saying it, and grapple with it. 

Early on, it is iterated and reiterated that in the 18^th century, white men without property, women, and people of color were excluded from “We, the people.” I take the interactive test, repeated at regular intervals, to see if I can vote, knowing full well that women could not vote until 1920. I will have to walk the circle for about 15 more panels before women get the vote. 

In fact, if I read everything on the walls and partake of the vote behind the curtain, if I press on the most interesting faces in the National Tree to learn their backgrounds and contributions, if I try to pass the Naturalization Test by answering the questions, if I ponder, given a mound of facts, whether the Federalists were right or wrong, whether there should or should not be a national bank, whether U.S. troops should or should not break the 1791 treaty with the Indians and force the Cherokees from their lands, whether human beings can be “property,” whether the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Morgans were “robber barons” or captains of industry, why women had to roar for seven decades before they got the vote, whether immigrants were “mongrel dogs” or the source new vitality for this nation of immigrants, and whew! scores of all-important questions, it will take me an average of 17 hours.

I sit in a library alcove and read from the same books, lent by The Library Company, that the delegates read: the seminal Magna Carta, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I can push a silver button on the large tomes that line the bottom shelf, and key portions of Paine, Hume, and Montesquieu are read aloud to me.

Moving on to another alcove, I sit by a 1940s radio and hear Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chat” broadcasts from the 1940s. I move to the middle circle and watch as a visitor, a 14-year-old girl, stands behind a podium to take the actual Oath of Office for U.S. President. Her father is a doctor from India, and she, born in the United States, is a natural-born citizen. Not only will she be able to vote, though she could not have done this in 1919, but she can become this country’s president. A huge screen projects her image onto stage center while footage makes members of Congress appear to look on. Her voice, serious to begin with, turns properly solemn as she swears to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America, exactly as did John F. Kennedy in the first election where I could vote. 

By now, I am used to the animated voices -- the hush, the whisper, the angry furor, the laughter, the call, the oration. I am vaguely aware that I have been walking the circle from a darker space into a progressively brighter one, and then I note that the voices are different as the circle opens out to the real-life overlook of Independence Hall. Here, in a large, empty space is the penultimate phrase of the Preamble, “for ourselves and our posterity.” It is the future, and every man, woman, and child traversing this open space is called upon to fill it with his own voice and considered action.

It is sobering, the weight of this responsibility that accompanies all those rights and freedoms we take for granted. Our National Constitution Center brought me back to a moment in 1968 when I was living in London and participated in what was supposed to be a peaceful anti-Vietnam War march that ended at the American Embassy. When the giant trail of student protesters arrived at the Embassy, I climbed a tree to get a better view of how the demonstration would end and suddenly saw huge numbers of Molotov cocktails being hurled against the windows of my embassy and exploding. I was fully against such action, yet I was fully against the Vietnam War. The question of how to effectively give voice to protest and dissent would sit heavily on my shoulders that day, and it is still as weighty a question for today and for “our posterity.”    

Now I am ready to take the walk into the final component of the permanent exhibit, Signers’ Hall, an evocation of the Assembly Room where, on September 17, 1787, the signers of the original Constitution met to forge a future. The entryway is angled, and through the glass doors, I see men gathered in groups, as men will. As I come closer, I see that these are life-sized statues, bronze statues, mostly grouped in twos and threes, looking thoughtful, deliberative, concerned. In fact, these are the 42 men who have gathered to assent or dissent. The three men from Rhode Island -- who refused to sign because the issues that would later be addressed in the Bill of Rights were not included here – are off to one side. Some of the 55 who worked to write the Constitution are not present: Jefferson and Adams are in Europe, others are ill, have pressing business, or have left in disgust.  

Each figure has been sculpted after being heavily researched by Ray Smock, the long-time historian for the U.S. House of Representatives. Every portrait, every extant statue has been examined, the archives have been consulted, and even tailors’ measurements for the clothes and the hem length of the waistcoat have been ascertained. As other daily visitors and I walk among the men, peering into their faces and observing stance and stature, each of us appears to be an animated participant in the dialogue.

George Washington stands alone before the document that will change the world. Alexander Hamilton stands solo, at a distance, separated perhaps by his envy of Washington. Born on the Caribbean island of Nevis, Hamilton knows that only a natural-born citizen can ever be president of the United States.

One signer’s hand partially obscures his face, and this is the one for whom there is no record at all. Most of the men measure between 5’7” and 5’9” making the 6’2” George Washington and Gouverneur Morris the tallest men in the room. The peg-legged Morris stands with the Pennsylvania delegation, but the designers, Studio EIS, portray him leaning on his cane so that the father of the country can visually prevail.

Ben Franklin, 81years old at the signing, is seated, and because he is the most easily recognized, gets a lot of fond embraces, head pats, and nose rubbing from the million visitors per year. Kids climb into his lap and pull at his glasses, and just last year, the Center went through three pairs of glasses. Ben’s nose and head have been re-gilded, and his glasses were recast, re-gilded, and soldered on at a cost of $1,500 each time. That’s a lot, even for a non-profit with an endowment of $40 million. So Ben no longer wears his glasses – which, by the by, do not appear in his portrait on the $100 bill.

Soon enough, the visitor notices that he is being asked to make the same choice that the framers faced: to sign or not to sign the Constitution. Under the watchful eye of George Washington, I reach for the pen. Those who elect not to sign are invited to state their reasons, thus joining another honorable American tradition.

                                                *                      *                      *

When the National Constitution Center was proposed, not long after Philadelphia’s Bicentennial celebration of the signing, I was a little miffed that the vast spaces where I and countless others celebrated Ben Franklin on weekends by kite flying would be diminished. I would no longer be able to run freely, kite in hand, invention in mind, across that sacred ground.

But what has evolved in this National Constitution Center is an extraordinary place where memory will not be erased; a place where “We, the people…” is more than a document studied briefly in elementary and high school history texts; a place where questions about who we were, who we are, and who we want to be as a nation are central and ongoing; a place which reminds us over and over again to seek understanding and to participate; and a place where Thomas Paine, in his pamphlet Common Sense, reminds us that “those who expect the blessings of freedom must be willing to undergo the fatigue to support it.”     

Even if the National Constitution Center with its 160,000 square feet of public space had cost more than $185 million, it would have been worth every penny.