Progressivism - Constituting America

The United States Supreme Court: Landmark Decisions and the Justices Who Made Them

90 in 90 2017, Blog, William Morrisey, Ph.D. 7. U.S. Supreme Court Decisions and Justices, 13. Guest Constitutional Scholar Essayists, 7. The United States Supreme Court: Landmark Decisions and the Justices Who Made Them., The United States Supreme Court: Landmark Decisions and the Justices Who Made Them, William Morrisey PhD

Guest Essayist: William Morrisey

Introduction: Why Study the Landmark Decisions?

What does it mean to “constitute” America?

How would anyone do that? And why?

And what is “America,” anyway?

“America can mean simply the “New World”—the two American continents, “new to the late-Renaissance Europeans who stumbled upon them en route to China, if not to the Asian settlers who’d lived here for centuries. In that sense, hundreds of millions of Americans now live in dozens of countries, under several distinctive forms of government.

Given the prominent display of the Stars-and-Stripes flag on the Constituting America website, no one reading these words will imagine “America” to mean that, here. We mean the United States of America, a particular country in America, which declared its independence, its self-government, from an empire ruled from Europe. To assert self-government requires one to establish the terms and conditions by which that government will proceed. By leaving home, a young man or woman declares independence from parents: Very well then, but how will you live, under your newfound self-rule? You say you want to live at liberty, pursuing happiness, but what’s your plan? Read more

February 18, 2017/5 Comments/by Janine Turner and Cathy Gillespie

1912, Eugene Debs’ Socialism And The U. S. Constitution

6. Guest Constitutional Scholar Essayists, 90 in 90 2016, Joerg W. Knipprath 6. Presidential Elections and Their Constitutional Impact, 13. Guest Constitutional Scholar Essayists, 17. Topics, 1912 Eugene Debs’ Socialism And The U. S. Constitution, Joerg W. Knipprath, Progressive, Socialism, Supreme Court

Guest Essayist: Professor Joerg Knipprath

Dissenting from the Supreme Court’s 1905 opinion in Lochner v. New York that found unconstitutional a maximum-hour law for bakery employees, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., declared, “[A] constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire.” Holmes’s point is valid at least to the extent that the Framers–most of whom adhered to the then-dominant mercantilism–did not encrypt the grand contours of a particular system of political economy in the Constitution’s provisions aligning and balancing individual liberties and governmental powers. Yet, the Constitution also protects personal rights whose exercise is more likely to be realized in a political system premised on fundamentally liberal (in the classic meaning) conceptions of the role of the government and the individual’s relationship to the State than in a system that rests on a different view of such essential matters.

1912, Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism”

6. Guest Constitutional Scholar Essayists, 90 in 90 2016, William Morrisey, Ph.D. 6. Presidential Elections and Their Constitutional Impact, 13. Guest Constitutional Scholar Essayists, 17. Topics, 1912 Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism”, Articles of Confederation, Declaration of Independence, William Morrisey PhD

Guest Essayist: Professor William Morrisey

By August 1910, Theodore Roosevelt had been out of office for a year and a half. He was unhappy with President William Howard Taft’s performance. Although Roosevelt had effectively designated Taft as his successor and continued to esteem him personally, Taft wanted no part of the rising Progressive movement in American politics. By 1910, Roosevelt did, for reasons that remain controversial.

Progressivism And The Constitution

6. Guest Constitutional Scholar Essayists, 90 in 90 2016, Matthew Spalding, Ph.D. 6. Presidential Elections and Their Constitutional Impact, 13. Guest Constitutional Scholar Essayists, 17. Topics, Declaration of Independence, Matthew Spalding PhD, Progressivism And Its Theory Of Constitutionalism

Guest Essayist: Matthew Spalding

In The Federalist No. 47 James Madison asserted that “accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Indeed, the importance of the separation of powers was so widely accepted by the American public in 1788 that Madison could confidently declare it to be “the sacred maxim of free government.” Today, however, government agencies routinely make, enforce, and adjudicate legally binding rules that have the full force and effect of laws passed by Congress. Such evidence leaves no doubt that there has been a revolutionary shift in the constitutional theory guiding American politics since the time of the American Founding. But how—and why—did this revolution come to be? The answer is to be found in a broad movement known as progressivism that came to dominate both the American academy and government in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.

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