National Affairs: Autumn Oratory

On a stage set at the base of the floodlighted Washington Monument, Franklin Delano Roosevelt last week addressed 65,000 listeners massed on the slick green lawns of Washington’s Sylvan Theatre. Occasion of the speech was the 150th Anniversary of the signing of the U. S. Constitution by 38 delegates in Philadelphia. Having made the Constitution the most controversial U. S. political subject of the year, the President took the opportunity to define his views on it, emphasize the familiar theme that in the past four years the Supreme Court has obstructed the will of the U. S. electorate by legalistic interpretations.

Expounding on the text that the Constitution was a “layman’s document not a lawyer’s contract,” and does not specify the number of Supreme Court Justices, the President declared:

“We can no longer afford the luxury of 20 year lags. You will find no justification in any of the language of the Constitution for delay in the reforms which the mass of the American people demand. . . . I ask that the American people rejoice in the wisdom of their Constitution. … I ask that they give their fealty to the Constitution itself and not to its misinterpreters. . . . For us, the Constitution is a common bond, without bitterness, for those who see America as Lincoln saw it—the last, best hope of earth.’ So we revere it, not because it is old but because it is ever new. …

While the President was thus expressing his faith in the Constitution its sesquicentennial was also observed by the University of Michigan Press by the publication of a hitherto unprinted autobiographical sketch and a letter by the figure in U. S. history who was one of the Constitution’s most vigorous interpreters: John Marshall, Chief Justice of the U. S. from 1801 to 1835. Written in 1827 to furnish data about his life to Associate Justice Joseph Story, who was reviewing Marshall’s History of the Colonies for the North American Review, the autobiographical sketch discovered five years ago,* shed little new light on its author’s life. But the letter, written when the Constitution was 40 years old voiced sentiments interesting on the Constitution’s 150th birthday: “I begin to doubt whether it will be long practicable peaceably to elect a Chief Magistrate possessing the powers which the Constitution confers on the President of the United States. … I begin to fear that our Constitution is not doomed to be so long lived as its real friends have hoped. What may follow sets conjecture at defiance. . . .”

Justice Story’s articles used material from the autobiography verbatim. The Story articles in turn were source material used by the late Albert Jeremiah Beveridge of Indiana in his monumental Life of John Marshall.

*Justice Story left the original to his son, Sculptor William Wetmore Story, who left it to his son, Sculptor Thomas Waldo Story. In 1856 the William Storys moved to Rome and for some 50 years an apartment in the Palazzo Barberini was the family home. When Mrs. Waldo Story died in Rome in 1932, the document was discovered by Professor Marco F. Liberma. onetime teacher of Italian at the University of Michigan. Professor Liberma sold it to Ann Arbor’s William L. Clements Library. Librarian Randolph Greenfield Adams asked his father, Lawyer John Stokes Adams, to edit the autobiography, write the preface.