Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
I wonder how many people are aware that there is a special day that has been set aside by Congress to commemorate the signing of the Constitution each year.
From the Library of Congress:
Constitution Day and Citizenship Day is observed each year on September 17 to commemorate the signing of the Constitution on September 17, 1787, and “recognize all who, by coming of age or by naturalization, have become citizens.”
This commemoration had its origin in 1940, when Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing and requesting the President to issue annually a proclamation setting aside the third Sunday in May for the public recognition of all who had attained the status of American citizenship. The designation for this day was “I Am An American Day.”
In 1952 Congress repealed this joint resolution and passed a new law moving the date to September 17 to commemorate “the formation and signing, on September 17, 1787, of the Constitution of the United States” but the day was designated “Citizenship Day” and also retained its original purpose of recognizing all those who had attained the status of American citizenship. This law urged civil and educational authorities of states, counties, cities and towns to make plans for the proper observance of the day and “for the complete instruction of citizens in their responsibilities and opportunities as citizens of the United States and of the State and locality in which they reside.”
In 2004 under Senator Byrd’s urging, Congress changed the designation of this day to “Constitution Day and Citizenship Day” and added two new requirements in the commemoration of this Day. The first is that the head of every federal agency provide each employee with educational and training materials concerning the Constitution on September 17th. The second is that each education institution that receives federal funds hold an educational program on the Constitution for students on September 17 of each year.
It appears that few Americans know about this educational requirement. It also appears that few schools have complied with the Congressional mandate to hold an educational program about the Constitution on the designated date.
As a former teacher, I’m not one to argue that we shouldn’t be teaching our students about the Constitution. I think our educational institutions should provide our children with in-depth knowledge of the Constitution of the United States—as well as with a wealth of information about the organization and responsibilities of the three branches of our Federal Government.
A new project sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots aims to pressure public schools to teach students about the Constitution this coming September. That sounds like a good idea on the surface—but here’s what has some legal advocates concerned: The Tea Party Patriots are advocating for the use of their favored “Constitutional” curriculum in the public schools.
Doug Kendall, the Founder and President of the Constitutional Accountability Center, recently penned an article on the subject of the Tea Party Patriots and their favored Constitutional curriculum for the Huffington Post. In his article titled Parents: This Fall, Beware Tea Partiers Dressed Up as James Madison, Kendall wrote:
“When I was growing up, my mom warned me each fall about Halloween candy with a hidden razor blade. As a parent, the thing I’ll be most scared about this fall is the prospect of Tea Partiers coming to my child’s school dressed up like James Madison to ‘teach’ the U.S. Constitution.
“It is undoubtedly the case that all our kids could use a good civics lesson, but these modern day Madisons are peddling snake oil, not real history. Mother Jones reported yesterday that, during Constitution Week in September this year, the so-called ‘Tea Party Patriots’ are planning to pressure school boards across America to allow them into our schools to teach our children about the Constitution using materials from the National Center for Constitutional Studies, an organization founded by a genuinely scary individual named W. Cleon Skousen, a far-right conspiracy theorist with links to the John Birch Society who passed away in 2006.”
Kendall claims the curriculum developed by the National Center for Constitutional Studies uses highly inaccurate source material and issued the following challenge:
“I defy the Tea Party Patriots to find one credible historian willing to support their view of the Constitution’s history. Before the Tea Party gets to go into school and teach our children about the Constitution, they need to find a tenured professor on the history faculty on one of any of the 50 highest-rated universities in the United States who will vouch for the accuracy of their teachings. To qualify to teach America’s children about the Constitution you need to do more than dress up like James Madison.”
In Radical Constitutionalism, an article that appeared in the New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen called W. Cleon Skousen “the constitutional guru of the Tea Party movement.” Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, says Skousen “argued that the founding fathers rejected collectivist ‘European’ philosophies and instead derived their divinely inspired principles of limited government from fifth-century Anglo-Saxon chieftains, who in turn modeled themselves on the Biblical tribes of ancient Israel” in his 1981 book The 5,000 Year Leap.
Skousen believed our Constitution was “divinely inspired.” Rosen says Skousen “saw limited government as not only an ethnic idea, rooted in the Anglo-Saxons, but also as a Christian one, embodied in the idea of unalienable rights and duties that derive from God, and he insisted that the founders’ ‘religious precepts turned out to be the heart and soul of the entire American political philosophy.’”
Rosen reports that Skousen was dismissed by mainstream conservatives for many years as “a conspiracy-mongering extremist.” In an article that appeared in Mother Jones last week, Stephanie Mencimer wrote: “Skousen’s views on the Constitution are considered well outside the mainstream, and they include ideas drawn from white supremacist dogma and other shady sources. One of his textbooks on constitutional history contained blatantly racist material suggesting that slaves were actually a happy bunch of folks.”
So how did Skousen’s views on our Constitution, which had been considered outside the mainstream by most conservatives for years, become popular with the Tea Party Patriots? Why, Glenn Beck…of course! Beck helped give a boost to Skousen’s book The 5000 Year Leap when he endoresed it. The book then became both a bestseller and a Tea Party favorite.
In December of 2008, Beck recommended the book to his followers as a way to become informed about “socialism and communism and fascism, and the free market, Americanism.”
Beck wrote of Skousen’s book:
“The first thing you could do, please, is get the 5,000 Year Leap. Over my book or anything else, get the 5,000 Year Leap. You can probably find it in the book section of GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. It is so easy to read. It’s the book Ronald Reagan wanted taught in high schools and Ted Kennedy stopped it from happening. That should tell you all you need to know. It is so easy to understand. When you read these principles, your mouth will fall open. You’ll read it and you’ll be – the scales will fall off your eyes on who we are. Please, number one thing: Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all about. 5,000 Year Leap is the first part of that. Because it will help you understand American free enterprise. You’ll be able to defend it. You’ll be able to know what makes it possible for 6% of humanity living under our free economy to produce 1/2 of the Earth’s developed wealth every single year. That’s staggering! What is it? It’s the virtues and the principles that our founders believed in, that took us and pushed us and made us – allowed us to take a 5,000 year leap from the dark into the sunshine. We should know why collectivism is wrong. We should know why federal supervision is going to hold our standard of living down. It will reduce our productivity, just as it has in every single country where it has ever been tried. We should know why communist leaders of the past considered socialism the high road to communism. We should know the words of the old communist leaders that said ‘We don’t need to fight a war. We can push them into socialism and once we have them into socialism, communism is next.’ We should see and read the actual words of the early 20th century American Progressives and see the roots.”
Who wouldn’t trust the Constitutional views of a man who wrote a book that Glenn Beck thinks is the most important book for Americans to read??? Who wouldn’t want their children learning about our Constitution from educational materials provided by an organization founded by that same individual?
If, on the other hand, you’re as concerned about Tea Party Patriots pressuring your local school board to adopt the curriculum materials developed by the National Center for Constitutional Studies to teach your children about the Constitution as Doug Kendall is, you might want to check with your local school system to see what plans it may have for Constitution Day on September 17th.
SOURCES
The Tea Party Wants to Teach Your Kids About the Constitution (Mother Jones)
Legal Advocates Slam Tea Party Constitution Classes (Mother Jones)
Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life:Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him (Salon)
Parents: This Fall, Beware Tea Partiers Dressed Up as James Madison (Huffington Post)
Radical Constitutionalism (New York Times)
Glenn Beck: Are you a Sept. 12th person? (Glenn Beck)
Wearing Dunce Cap, Tea Party Tries To Indoctrinate Children With Bad Constitutional History (Constitutional Accountability Center)
Elaine M,
“So glad you reminded me that the end is near!”
To quote The Green One – One lives to be of service.
“Must make sure I have some wild and crazy fun before Saturday dawns on the horizon.”
I wish the Rapture had happened about a week ago … it would have saved me an additional week of feeling like 10 lbs of manure stuffed into a 1 lb bag!
Thanks, lady … slowly but surely I’m coming along 🙂
ekeyra,
That’s quite a gory picture!
Stamford Liberal,
So glad you reminded me that the end is near! Must make sure I have some wild and crazy fun before Saturday dawns on the horizon.
🙂
Hope you’re up and about soon.
Elaine M,
I’ve been sick for almost two weeks and I’m finally able to semi-coherently collect my thoughts … excellent post. I echo AY – I wish I had a teacher like you when I was in elementary school!
Glenn Beck … lol … shouldn’t he be getting ready for the Rapture coming up on the 21st?!
Hmmm maybe letting parents decide who teaches their children and what they want taught to their children would solve the problem of right wing nut jobs putting political pressure on public schools?
Also google “cthulu constitution” if you want a hilarious parody of that picture of jesus delivering the constituion to america.
As far as I can tell, since education is not mentioned in the Constitution, it is one of those powers reserved to the states until the Supreme Court declares that education is a fundamental interest. (Tenth Amendment)
The constitution of a state usually determines where power over education is vested in state government. Unless educated parents in the usual suspect states take Kendell’s warnings seriously and unite against “Tea Partiers Dressed Up as James Madison”, their children will be fully exposed to the folderol that is teabagger intellectualism.
Have you heard the latest news about Glenn Beck?
*****
Glenn Beck to hold Jerusalem rally
By Justin Elliott
Salon, 5/16/2011
http://www.salon.com/news/israel/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/05/16/glenn_beck_jerusalem
Excerpt:
Michael Calderone reports:
Glenn Beck announced on his radio show Monday that he is planning to hold a rally in Jerusalem in August called “Restoring Courage.” Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally drew hundreds of thousandsWashington, D.C. in August of 2010, but Beck said that drawing as many to Jerusalem will be more difficult.
Beck told his listeners that a disaster is about to strike Israel, and that unspecified enemies “are going to attack the center of our faith, our common faith, and that is Jerusalem. And it won’t be with bullets or bombs. It will be with a two-state solution that cuts off Jerusalem, the old city, from the rest of the world. ”
Translation: The rally will be filled with ambiguous messianic rhetoric and will oppose any sharing of Jerusalem between Israelis and Palestinians, both of whom claim the city as their national capital.
The announcement comes just days after Beck returned from a surprise trip to Israel, during which he visited tourist sites, broke his raw food diet, and donned a yarmulke. (One Israel press report also said Beck would be meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but if that happened, it was not publicly reported.)
Beck, a Mormon, has not always had the best relations with the Jewish community. He, for example, took flak last year for a week-long attack on the liberal philanthropist — er, “Puppet Master” –George Soros that was steeped in anti-semitic tropes. The Anti-Defamation League ultimately forgave Beck because of his right-wing pro-Israel stance.
Beck guru Skousen’s “story of slavery” suggests slave owners were “worst victims of the system”
Media Matters
September 30, 2009
http://mediamatters.org/research/200909300024
Excerpt:
Fox News’ Glenn Beck has heavily promoted the writings of far-right activist W. Cleon Skousen, even making Skousen’s book, The 5000 Year Leap, a central part of his 9-12 Project. Skousen is the author of several controversial works, including The Making of America: The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution, which presented as “the story of slavery in America” a passage from a book that attacked abolitionists for delaying emancipation; cast slave owners as “the worst victims of the system”; claimed white schoolchildren “were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates”; and claimed that “[s]lavery did not make white labor unrespectable, but merely inefficient,” because “the slave had a deliberateness of motion which no amount of supervision could quicken.”
**********
Read the following excerpts from Skousen’s book “The Making of America”:
•Newly sold slaves “usually a cheerful lot.” “The tendency was to sell families as units, if for no other reason [than] to keep the slaves contented. The gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains. At the other extreme, when the Central of Georgia railroad company in 1858 equipped a Negro sleeping car to assist in the slave trade it set a standard not always maintained in a later generation. When on the block, the slave was as likely to hinder as to help in his sale. Some, out of a vain conceit in bringing a high price, would boast of their physical prowess, in which case an unwary purchaser would likely be cheated. Others would malinger, because of a grudge against owners or traders or in order to bring a low price and be put at less tiring labor. Dealers, also, adopted the tricks of horse traders to make their merchants more attractive — the greasiest Negro was generally considered the healthiest.” [The Making of America, pages 731-732]
•Slaves hampered efficiency of white labor. “In the management of slave labor the gang system predominated. The great majority of owners, having at the most only one or two families of Negroes, had to work alongside their slaves and set the pace for them. Slavery did not make white labor unrespectable, but merely inefficient. The slave had a deliberateness of motion which no amount of supervision could quicken. If the owner got ahead of the gang they all would shirk behind his back.” [The Making of America, page 732]
•White schoolchildren would “envy the freedom” of “colored playmates.” “Slave food, even if monotonous, was plentiful. Corn bread and bacon were the mainstays, with plenty of fruit and vegetables in season. In hog-killing time, countenances were unusually greasy. Clothing also was on the par with that of the poorer white people and no less adequate in proportion to the climate than that of Northern laborers. If [negro children] ran naked it was generally from choice, and when the white boys had to put on shoes and go away to school they were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates. The color line began to appear at about that time.” [The Making of America, pages 732-733]
•Cruelty rare, slave owners “the worst victims.” “Excessive toil occurred only where the masters or overseers were feeble witted as well as brutal. A persistent rumor among abolitionists was that sugar planters followed a policy of working slaves to death in seven years as a matter of economy. The persons spreading such reports were as ignorant of Negro nature as they were of conditions in the sugar mills. Furthermore, they overrated the ability of the masters to know how to kill a slave in the given time instead of leaving him a broken-down burden to the plantation. When they set out to prove the accusation they returned with no evidence, but convinced that the practice existed in some obscure region which they had not succeeded in ferreting out. Harriet Martineau, after watching slaves go through the motions of work without tiring themselves, considered the planters as models of patience and observed that new slave owners from Europe or the North were prone to be the most severe. Numerous observers, of various shades of opinion on slavery, agreed that brutality was no more common in the black belt than among free labor elsewhere, and that the slave owners were the worst victims of the system.” [The Making of America, pages 733-734]
**********
You can read more excerpts from “The Making of America” at the link I provided above.
rafflaw & pete,
That was an interesting article, wasn’t it? I didn’t find it until after I had published this post.
rafflaw – facts have a well known liberal bias, can’t have the little dears minds cluttered and confused with facts when there is a need to peddle a broken down philosophy.
Elaine
liked the link, especially at the end when it says
Speaking last year in Mesa, Ariz., Taylor spoke cryptically of the need for “the Good Lord’s help” to take America “into a much better phase of existence lasting for a thousand years.”
i recall someone else who’s system was going to last that long. he was about 988 years short
Great link Elaine!
Legal procedure isn’t content based. Court reformers get nowhere because they can’t agree on religion, abortions, unions etc.
What they end up with is a lot of talk that doesn’t affect any public policy. Most individuals have essentially no input into public policy. Their votes are statistically insignificant, their congressional representatives really don’t care what their constituents think, and the written communications individuals send to Congress and the administration aren’t even read. Discussion of policy is just a form of entertainment but has no value and is basically a waste of time.
Most people experience law in the context of divorce, custody, leases, mortgages, medical insurance and pensions.
Now that we no longer have access to federal courts we are all at risk of losing all of our property, our insurance and medical care, our pensions and social security, custody of our children and access to grand children, reputation, driver’s licenses, and physical liberty.
The Bizarre Religious Myths Mormon Right-Wingers Are Pushing on Tea Partiers — With Glenn Beck’s Help
With the rise of the right, the National Center for Constitutional Studies’ bizarre version of U.S. history is gaining adherents.
By Alexander Zaitchik
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/150333/the_bizarre_religious_myths_mormon_right-wingers_are_pushing_on_tea_partiers_–_with_glenn_beck's_help/
Excerpt:
March 22, 2011 | FAIRMONT, W. Va. — One fine Saturday morning last year, around 60 mostly middle-aged conservatives trickled onto the otherwise deserted campus of Fairmont State University. Clutching notebooks and coffee cups, they looked like groggy Continuing Ed students as they took seats in a modern lecture hall on the ground floor of the school’s engineering building. In a sense, they were Continuing Ed students. The room had been booked months in advance for a one-day, intro-level history and civics seminar entitled, “The Making of America.”
But this was no ordinary summer school. Randall McNeely, the seminar’s kindly, awkward, and heavy-set instructor, held no advanced degree and made no claims to being a scholar of any kind. He was, rather, a product of rote training in a religious and apocalyptic interpretation of American history that has roots in the racist right of the last century. His students for the day had learned about the class not in the Fairmont State summer catalog, but from the website of an obscure nonprofit run by fringe Mormons. Founded as the Freeman Institute in Provo, Utah, in 1971, the outfit now goes by the name National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCSS), and works out of a remote farmhouse in Malta, Idaho (population 177).
This humble base of operations, however, constrains neither the outfit’s national ambitions nor its missionary zeal. The NCCS has been touring the country and propagating its ultraconservative Mormon message for nearly four decades. Yet its message has never been in greater demand than in 2010. Since the rise of the Tea Party circuit, the all-volunteer NCCS has experienced exploding interest from Tea Party-affiliated groups such as the 9.12 Project and the Tea Party Patriots. On any given Saturday, several of nearly 20 “Making of America” lecturers are giving seminars across the country in spaces like the rented classroom in Fairmont, with $10 tickets and NCCS book sales paying for their travel and expenses.
Along with a busier schedule, the NCCS also has a growing list of allies. In the media, it has found a powerful voice in the form of Fox News’ Glenn Beck, who is a Mormon himself and has used his pulpit to advocate for NCCS books and ideas. Through Beck’s sustained and energetic advocacy, once-forgotten NCCS tracts of Mormon-flavored pseudo-history such as The 5,000 Year Leap have become unlikely online bestsellers. As a result, traveling volunteer NCCS lecturers like McNeely today have no shortage of students eager to learn his version of “truth.”
High schools should have a one year law curriculum geared to their potential personal legal needs. Students should learn the basics of due process so that they can more effectively attempt to defend their lives, liberty, property and reputation. This should start with the assumption that they are at real risk of losing everything.
Excellent piece, Elaine. Thank you for the information.
James M.,
Justice Scalia does not have impeccable credentials, in my humble opinion. How about if we let Constitutional scholars who use facts teach about the Consitution? Justice Scalia is bought and paid for by corporations. This is the same justice who doesn’t believe that he is impervious to conflict of interest even when duck hunting with litigants!
At least there is no debate that public schools are the ideal vehicle to indoctrinate the next generation with whatever flavor of pro-government propaganda is favored at the moment.
A couple of years ago I got to see Judge Posner speak at an event held by the National Archives for Constitution Day. I don’t have any problem with all educated viewpoints about the Constitution being presented — the key word there being educated. If the Tea Party was smart, they’d have Justice Scalia or someone else with impeccable credentials but a radical conservative viewpoint record a 30 minute lecture on some Constitutional topic (likely federalism or the nature of limited government) and then push schools to show all their students the tape.
Elaine,
Other than feats that criminals teach…..I learn something valuable everyday from this blawg…..Today…..mame….You have exceed expectations of learning this boy something, anew ……
I wish I had had all of my elementary teachers as great as you appear… If it had not had been for an exceptional Vo-Ag instructor….seeing a frustrated kid who cut school about 2 to 3 times a week…that was on the AB horror role…but just didn’t care for school….well, until I met college…. thats another subject all together….
Thank you again….