Bulwark of the Republic: A Biography of the Constitution
by
[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $3.50]
MR. HENDRICK could not write an uninteresting book if he tried. He has taken what is ordinarily one of the drabbest departments of the American past, our constitutional history, and made it glow with color and sparkle with vitality. When the nation was celebrating the centenary of its Constitution, John Fiske described the birth of the instrument in one of his most brilliant pieces of exposition, The Critical Period. Now we are celebrating the sesquicentennial; and Mr. Hendrick has written an equally brilliant exposition, not only of the framing of the Constitution, but of its growth and adaptation in later generations.
Like Fiske’s, Mr. Hendrick’s book is for the intelligent layman, not the scholar. Making no pretense to original research, it tries rather to sum up effectively the latest results of the scholarship of other men. Like Fiske’s again, it contains no important new interpretations or ideas; its value lies in its clarity, vitality, and color. But even scholars will read it with unflagging interest; and though they may protest against the oversimplification of certain situations, they will profit from its general soundness, its lucid presentation of ideas, its pungent character sketches, and its deft interweaving of political, social, and constitutional history.
Mr. Hendrick’s attitude toward the Constitution, as his title implies, is reverential. From his point of view, it is the great central entity of American history. As its ‘biographer,’he makes it the protagonist of our whole national record; and his pages gain drama and suspense from his intense sympathy with its integrity. He shows how fiercely the storms of American history have threatened and buffeted it; how it was assailed by New England secessionists and Southern nullificationists, weakened by the slavery struggle, almost forgotten in the fever of civil war, and temporarily subverted in the intolerant days of reconstruction. He shows also how it has emerged triumphantly from every ordeal. But his attitude toward the chief expounders of the Constitution, the Supreme Court, is strictly realistic. His word ‘bulwark’ soon becomes rather inapt. He rightly regards the Constitution as a living, growing organism. In writing the history of the Supreme Court, his sympathy is first with the nationalists who under John Marshall made the Constitution supreme, and then with the progressives who since Taney have kept the Constitution alive and growing. He selects for especial praise, in the recent history of constitutional interpretation, such liberals as John M. Harlan and Holmes; he emphasizes the fact that the dissenting opinions of one generation become the prevailing interpretation of the next.
Though far from approving Mr. Roosevelt’s recent proposals as to the Court, he equally disapproves the attitude of those obstructive justices who provoked the President’s demands. After his tributes to Harlan and Holmes, he names five men on the Court to-day who stand for their noble tradition of a developing Constitution; and they are the five who have given the recent majority decisions of that body.
Mr. Hendrick’s book gains in vigor from his strong convictions upon many phases of American history; sometimes it loses a little in balance and impartiality. His chapters on the formation of the Constitution are excellent, and so are those on the great work of John Marshall. But he leans heavily toward the free-soil view of the slavery issue, with conclusions that are severe upon Calhoun and Davis, harsh upon Pierce and Buchanan, and decidedly questionable upon Stephen A. Douglas, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott decision.
A fuller, fairer discussion of the constitutional aspects of secession would have improved the book. After 1860 the exposition becomes decidedly sketchy. Of the complex, far-ramifying, and momentous constitutional issues under Lincoln, only emancipation is really discussed; reconstruction is hurried over; and the great constitutional problems and changes which followed the Fourteenth Amendment and the rise of big business are inadequately described. The work is really a biography of the Constitution up to 1860, with an outline of some of the chief subsequent developments; it is hardly more, and a subtitle indicating the fact would have saved Mr. Hendrick some criticism. But within this seventy-five-year period it is often brilliant, always absorbing, and as a whole a valuable piece of popular history — in the best sense of the term — in a difficult field.
ALLAN NEVINS