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What the Constitution Means to Me finished its last performance at the Kennedy Center on Sunday, marking a successful conclusion to its nearly sold-out run in Washington. A finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Heidi Schreck’s one-woman show is at once a comedic and occasionally heartbreaking meditation on the Constitution’s relevance to the modern world. In ninety breathless minutes, Schreck recounts her transformation from a fifteen-year-old American Legion debate champion and self-professed Constitutional “zealot” to a jaded critic who rages against the Constitution’s silence in the face of an unjust world.
What belies this evolution? Carefully interwoven between amusing anecdotes of her teenage self’s rhapsodic rhetoric (the Ninth Amendment, for example, is a great “penumbra”) and fellow debaters’ tortured metaphors (is the Constitution a patchwork quilt? Or more of a witch’s crucible?) are episodes from Schreck’s own life and family history, which is plagued with domestic violence and personal tragedy. Undergirding Schreck’s disillusionment is a sense that the document fails to protect the interests of anyone beyond the white men who designed it over two hundred years ago. “We all belong in the preamble!” is her rallying cry.
Schreck’s play taps into a sentiment that is burning in certain corners of contemporary political discourse. It also revives a question that former AEI Resident Scholar Robert Goldwin explored almost thirty years ago in a collection of essays titled Why Blacks, Women and Jews Are Not Mentioned in the Constitution, and Other Unorthodox Views. If women and minorities are not in the preamble, just where in the Constitution are they?
As Goldwin articulated in the pages of his book and a subsequent panel event at AEI — which featured a diverse cast of intellectual luminaries such as Walter Berns, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Michael Novak, Ron Walters, and Gertrude Himmelfarb — the answer lies in the very silence that Schreck so derides. Critical omissions allowed the framers to grant the Constitution a paradoxical existence as a timeless document that could yet accommodate society’s moral evolution.
The issues of race and slavery provide instructive examples. Unlike the Articles of Confederation, words such as “race,” “color,” “black,” “white,” “slave,” or “slavery” are nowhere to be found in the Constitution’s text, which instead employs the careful language of persons “held to service.” In making this distinction, the Constitution’s authors managed to shield the document from enshrining a right to own slaves or deny political rights based on race. This was a remarkable act of moral imagination at a time when slavery and racism were endemic in the United States, which then allowed the original Constitution to serve as the foundation for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments.
The same can be said for the absence of the words “male” or “female” in the text. Although state constitutions and federal acts such as the Northwest Ordinance explicitly disenfranchised women, the Constitution contains no such detail. Moreover, Goldwin persuasively argues that the male pronouns found in the Constitution are meant to be gender neutral. If “he” was used to describe the responsibilities of exclusively male lawmakers in Article I, section 3, it would have to then absolve female criminals from the legal consequences outlined in Article IV, section 2. Whether by oversight or design, this feature allowed the Constitution to quietly conserve women’s rights until society was ready to unleash them in full in the early twentieth century.
Goldwin also offers a needed challenge to the claim that the Constitution was specifically designed to advance the interests of the slave-owning South. Rather than serving as a callous referendum on the humanity of blacks, the three-fifths compromise was actually a blow to the South’s political power, countering the proposition of slaveholders such as Pierce Butler that the men and women they held in bondage should count in full towards a state’s representation in Congress. As Frederick Douglass noted in 1860, this compromise only underscored the document’s fundamentally “anti-slavery” orientation.
Perhaps these arguments would not satisfy Schreck, who uses recent court cases to highlight how the Constitution and Supreme Court have failed women and minorities in specific instances. It seems that Schreck is looking for the lengthy enumeration of rights that have been found in foreign constitutions, which exchange longevity for specificity. Even Thomas Jefferson counseled against the rule of the dead, although he offered this observation from the comfort of Paris while his compatriots argued in a sweaty Pennsylvania courthouse.
In a loquacious world of identities and definitions, it is hard to understand the value of silence. Nevertheless, there is an argument that the Constitution’s very restraint made it an active document. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s metaphor, the Constitution is a silver frame preserving the Declaration of Independence’s gold apple, the contemplation of which constantly draws the United States towards a greater fulfillment of the Revolution’s promise. Like the Ninth Amendment that Schreck claims to admire, there is freedom in the penumbra. That’s what the Constitution should mean to all of us.
Nicole Penn is the program manager for AEI’s Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies Department.
In a loquacious world, it is hard to understand the value of silence. Yet there is an argument that the Constitution’s restraint made it an active document.
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