Constitution Day and How Americans Marked the Charter's Great Anniversaries

Here is a strange fact about the most important legal document in the world. For most of our history we have remembered its birthday only when a round number forced us to, and then we threw a parade and went back to ignoring it. A birthday party every fifty or hundred years is not a relationship. It is a reunion.

That is not entirely fair to our ancestors, and I will tell you why. Each great anniversary of the Constitution, taken in order, works like a photograph of the country at that moment. The pictures show what Americans thought the document was for, who they thought owned it, and how worried they were that it might be taken from them. Read them in sequence and you learn something no single date can teach. So let us walk the timeline, from the room in Philadelphia to the schoolhouse rule that now tells every federally funded school to mark September 17.

The day itself: September 17, 1787

The anniversary has to be about something, so start with what happened. On September 17, 1787, the delegates still present at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia met at the Pennsylvania State House, the building we now call Independence Hall, and signed the finished draft. Thirty-nine delegates signed. Some who had attended the long summer had gone home, and a few who stayed refused to sign. The convention then sent the text to Congress, which sent it to the states, because under the plan the delegates had written, the people of the states would decide.

That last point is the whole point. Article VII says that "The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same." Notice who is missing from that sentence. The delegates did not ratify their own work. Congress did not ratify it. The state legislatures did not ratify it. Special conventions chosen by the people did. The document begins "We the People" because it was approved in the name of the people, state by state, and it took effect only after the ninth convention, New Hampshire's in June 1788, said yes.

Benjamin Franklin supplied the day's most famous scene, and we have it from James Madison's notes of the convention. Franklin looked at the sun painted on the back of the chair in which George Washington had presided and said that painters find it difficult to distinguish a rising from a setting sun. He had often looked at that sun, he said, without being able to tell which it was. "But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun." Whether you take that as hope or as theater, it sets the tone for every anniversary since. The country has always been asked to decide which sun it is looking at.

1887: the centennial in Philadelphia

The first round-number anniversary came in 1887, and it is worth pausing on the date. Twenty-two years earlier the country had finished the bloodiest war in its history, a war fought over whether the promise in the Declaration and the structure in the Constitution could be made to match. Reconstruction was ending. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which had rewritten the Constitution's guarantees, were already law. The mood in 1887 was triumphant and a little defensive: the Union had held.

Philadelphia staged a three-day celebration, September 15 through 17, with a great parade, military units, civic societies and speeches. President Grover Cleveland came to the city for it, which tells you how seriously the occasion was taken. The orators of the day leaned hard on a theme that would recur: the Constitution as a work of men who were wise but not superhuman, a document that had survived because it was built to be amended and defended rather than worshipped.

One line from that era deserves to be remembered, though it was written a few years earlier and across the Atlantic. In 1878 the British statesman William Gladstone called the American Constitution "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man." Gladstone was no flatterer of America. He was the leading statesman of a rival power, and he said it anyway. It is one of the great compliments ever paid to a text, and note the word "struck." A constitution is struck, like a coin, for a purpose and at a moment. It is not found, like a fossil, or evolved, like a habit.

What did the 1887 celebration show? It showed a nation that treated the Constitution as a monument. The people who spoke were proud of it and wanted others to be proud of it. They were not especially interested in reading it. That is the first photograph: reverence, parade-sized and genuine, with the text itself mostly left in the glass case.

1937: the sesquicentennial and the Court fight

The next big date, 150 years, fell in 1937, and the timing was almost comic. Congress had created a United States Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission in the mid-1930s to plan the observance, and the commemoration arrived in the middle of the most serious constitutional quarrel of the twentieth century.

In February 1937 President Franklin Roosevelt proposed to enlarge the Supreme Court. His plan would have let him add a justice for each sitting justice over seventy who declined to retire, up to a total of six new seats. The justices had struck down several pieces of New Deal legislation, and the President wanted a Court that would stop doing that. The proposal was defended in the language of efficiency, but everybody understood it. It was an attempt to change the outcome by changing the umpires.

The Senate refused. A Senate committee led by members of the President's own party reported against the bill, and it died that summer. By September 17, 1937, the country was celebrating a document whose structure had just survived an attempt to reshape one of its three branches by statute and political pressure. The Constitution does not fix the number of justices; Congress sets it, and the number nine dates from 1869. The Court-packing fight was legal, in other words, and that was exactly what made it dangerous. A norm held where a text did not forbid.

I find this the most instructive anniversary of all. The Founders' design depends on limits that are not written down as bright lines. The independence of the judiciary rests on tenure during good behavior and on a salary that cannot be cut, both of which are in Article III. The number of seats on the bench rests on custom and on restraint. In 1937, on a birthday, the restraint won. Second photograph: a Constitution that was being celebrated and fought over in the same year, and which was safer for the fight.

1987: the bicentennial and Chief Justice Burger's commission

The bicentennial was the big one, and it was organized by law. In 1983 Congress created the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution. Chief Justice Warren Burger chaired it, and he kept the chair after he retired from the Court in 1986, devoting his later years to the project. This was a different kind of observance from 1887. It was not a parade with speeches. It was an educational campaign, and it put a premium on getting Americans to read and discuss the text.

The commission's work stretched across the years of the framing and ratification, a kind of slow-motion bicentennial, with events keyed to the dates of the Convention, the Federalist essays, and the ratifying conventions. On September 17, 1987, Philadelphia hosted a large national celebration, with a parade and a ceremony at Independence Hall in which President Reagan took part.

The bicentennial also produced something the earlier anniversaries had not: argument about the Constitution's flaws. Scholars and public figures argued openly that the original document had tolerated slavery and left out most Americans from the vote, and that the story of the Constitution had to be told with those facts in it. The constitutionalist's rule applies here: you do not defend the Constitution by hiding its compromises. You defend it by showing that its own text contained the means of correcting them. The three-fifths clause in Article I, Section 2, the fugitive slave clause in Article IV, and the twenty-year protection of the slave trade in Article I, Section 9 were compromises with a monstrous institution. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were adopted through Article V, the amendment process written into the original text. The document was struck, as Gladstone said, but it was struck with a lever for repair.

That is the third photograph: a nation that was ready to see the document whole, scars and strengths together, and that was more interested than at any previous anniversary in teaching it. The bicentennial created classroom materials, programs and public events with that purpose. Whether it worked is a question for the next section.

2004: the law that put the Constitution in the schoolhouse

The statute that turned an anniversary into an annual duty came in December 2004. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who carried a pocket copy of the Constitution and was fond of quoting it, attached a provision to the large omnibus appropriations bill for fiscal year 2005. It did two things.

First, it renamed the observance. Congress had designated September 17 as Citizenship Day in 1952, replacing an older "I Am an American Day." The new law made it Constitution Day and Citizenship Day.

Second, it attached a condition to federal money. Every educational institution that receives federal funds must hold an educational program on the United States Constitution on September 17 of each year. When the date falls on a weekend or a holiday, the program is held in the adjacent school week. The Department of Education later issued guidance explaining how the requirement applies, and federal agencies were covered by the same provision.

I have a mixed view of this law, and I will give it to you in two parts, because a fair reading of any statute has to be fair to both its aim and its method.

The aim is excellent. A republic that does not teach its own founding text will not keep it. The study of the Constitution is not an extra in civic life; it is the instrument by which citizens judge whether their rulers are acting within their powers. If you cannot name the three branches, the enumerated powers of Congress in Article I, Section 8, or the rights in the first ten amendments, you cannot tell when you are being governed outside the law.

The method is more modest than its fans suggest. The mandate asks for a program, not a result. It does not say what the program must contain or how long it must last. A school can satisfy it with a video, a worksheet or a ten-minute announcement. A mandate that is easy to meet will be met in the easiest way. The right conclusion is not that the law is useless but that it is a floor. It tells every funded school to pick up the book once a year. Whether students then learn anything depends on teachers, parents and school boards who care, which is where all real civic education has always lived.

Objection: why celebrate a document at all?

Here is the strongest objection, put as its defenders would put it. A birthday for a legal text, they say, risks turning law into liturgy. The Constitution is a tool, and tools should be judged by what they do. Reverence is for things that cannot be improved, and the Constitution has been improved, by its own amendment clauses, more than once. Worse, annual ceremonies can substitute for substance, letting officials praise the document on September 17 and ignore it for the other 364 days.

That is a serious point, and the fair answer concedes half of it. A ceremony is not a defense of anything. A senator who recites the Preamble and then votes to delegate his Article I power to an agency has honored the form and broken the substance.

But the objection proves too little. We celebrate because commemoration is how free peoples remember what they owe each other. The Constitution is not only a tool. It is an agreement, and agreements are kept in part by being renewed. The Founders themselves understood this. In Federalist No. 49 Madison cautioned against frequent appeals to the people on constitutional questions, arguing that frequent appeals would wear away the veneration that time gives a government. He was worried about too much tinkering, and he understood that a settled respect for the framework is part of what makes it work. Anniversaries are a harmless, even healthy, way to cultivate it, so long as the respect is aimed at the text and the limits it imposes, not at the persons who happen to be exercising power under it.

So I say keep the day. Just do not mistake the day for the duty.

What the four pictures add up to

Put the four photographs side by side and you get a pattern.

In 1787 the Constitution was a proposal, and the debate was about whether to adopt it. In 1887 it was a triumph, and the mood was pride. In 1937 it was a battlefield, and the question was whether its structure would hold under pressure from a popular President. In 1987 it was a subject for study, and the lesson was that a nation could tell the whole truth about its founding and still love it.

Notice what is constant. In every era the document survived because enough citizens, and enough officeholders, decided to be bound by words written long before they were born. That is the unspoken premise of the whole enterprise. A constitution is not self-enforcing. It lasts only as long as the people who run the government refuse to exceed it and the people who elect them refuse to reward those who do.

That is also why the best celebrations have been the ones that ended with a reading. Read Article I, Section 8 aloud. Read the Tenth Amendment, which says that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. Read the Preamble's list of purposes: to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. Then ask the plain question that every anniversary is secretly asking: are we still using this thing?

How to keep the day

You do not need a commission. A family or a congregation or a club can keep September 17 in an afternoon.

1. Read the Constitution's text aloud. It takes about half an hour for the original seven articles, longer with the amendments. Read it in turns. Nobody finishes without learning something they did not know was in it.
2. Read one Federalist essay. Number 10 on faction, number 51 on checks and balances, and number 78 on the judiciary each take only a few minutes.
3. Find out when your own school holds its required program, and ask what is in it. This is a legitimate question for a parent or a school board member, and it is a public one.
4. Take the civics test as a family and see who knows what.
5. Look up the oath of office in Article II, Section 1 and Article VI. Every federal and state officer swears or affirms to support the Constitution. Ask your own representative, politely, how that oath shapes a recent vote.

For more on the founding era, see Why July 2 Was Independence Day and Other Fourth of July Questions Answered, and for the long arc of the republic's birthday celebrations, America at 250 and What the Centennial and the Bicentennial Can Teach Us. If you want to see the man whose conduct made the whole experiment credible, read George Washington Gave Up Power Twice and Changed What Leaders Could Be. On the Constitution's first great application of its principles to slavery, see The Northwest Ordinance Banned Slavery From a Territory Bigger Than France, and for a document read slowly and well, The Gettysburg Address Read Closely Sentence by Sentence. The full text of the Constitution is on this site, free, and shorter than most terms-of-service agreements. That comparison should embarrass us a little. We click "I agree" on forty pages we never read, and we have a hard time finding half an hour for the seven articles that govern the people who govern us.

The case in brief

1. The Constitution was ratified by conventions of the people, in the name of "We the People," and every anniversary since has been a test of whether Americans still treat it as theirs.
2. The centennial of 1887 showed reverence, the sesquicentennial of 1937 coincided with a fight over the Court that the structure survived, and the bicentennial of 1987 taught the whole story, compromises and repairs included.
3. The 2004 law requiring federally funded schools to hold a program on September 17 sets a floor for civic education, not a ceiling, and it does only as much as teachers, parents and school boards make of it.
4. Commemoration is worth keeping, but only if it ends in reading the text and holding officials to their oaths.

What you can do: on September 17, read the Constitution aloud with your family or a neighbor, then ask your child's school what its Constitution Day program contains.