The Constitution

The Constitution and Education

I have been reading the newsletter of the Constitution Project (www.ConstitutionProject.org) which is a group that seems to believe in The Constitution. One of the issues was about the recent attack on habeas corpus, an attack that I oppose, and I wondered about the mindset of the attackers and how that mind set was engendered.
And then I wondered from what seed my opinion of The Constitution grew.

I am a pro Constitution guy. When I think of the Constitution I hear "F R E E D O M" ringing in my mind. You really should hear me sing it to get the full impact.
My concept of the freedom of which I sing was formed during the fifty years between 1935 and 1985 with a heavy emphasis on the first fifteen.

I grew up in small towns in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Utah and Colorado; I guess all the towns in the west were small then. In 1945 even Los Angeles had clean air; San Clemente, Dana Point and Laguna Beach were separate towns surrounded by walnut groves. Berries were grown on Knott’s Berry Farm.
I rode in the back of a pick-up with no thought of it being dangerous. Cars didn’t have seat belts but they did have running boards. On long trips my mom would make sandwiches to eat along the way and around noon my dad would stop at a roadside bar, of which there were many, and pick up a few bottles of beer and a Nehi to have with the sandwiches. One of the bonding moments between my dad and me was when he taught me how to throw a beer bottle out of the window of a moving car.
When it was time for my dad to go overseas my mom and I spent a couple of weeks at the town near the airbase he was to leave from. One afternoon I was left in the Officer’s Club while my mom and dad went for a ride in the nose of a B-17. This was against the rules but my dad felt that sometimes you had to rise above the rules.
The officers sitting at the bar saw that I had nothing to do and decided that they would relieve my boredom by giving me a chance to shoot a submachine gun. We all went out to the shooting range and a bunch of drunken Army Air Force officers handed a loaded submachine gun to an eight year old kid. I couldn’t control the gun and I couldn’t stop shooting. The gun barrel rose up and turned to the right; the officers, suddenly sober, hit the dirt. Fortunately I ran out of bullets before I caused serious damage.

My grandfather, Bill, was a semi-pro baseball player, an avid fisherman, a guy who knew how to do a lot of neat stuff and the owner of a saloon in Spokane. When prohibition came he sold the saloon and bought a ranch up around Deer Lodge, Montana. My dad and his brother, Bob, were born on the ranch.
My grandmother, Rose, was French-Canadian and could play the “Maple Leaf Rag” on the piano. She prayed a lot. When Bill died she decided to stay in Butte which indicates that she was a very strong woman.
One winter my dad’s horse fell on his foot while riding to grammar school and broke the foot underneath the horse quite badly. Bill laid him on his bed and tied rocks to his toes to set his foot. A high school girl from a nearby ranch stopped by a couple of times a week to teach him the three R’s and an old man brought him books to read; Sabitini, Dumas, Kenneth Roberts.
But Bill spent more time fishing than ranching and the family lost the ranch. They moved to Butte where Bill and the two boys went to work in the Anaconda copper mine.
My dad put himself through college and then took a commission in the Army. His first assignment was running a C.C.C. camp. It happened that there was no athletic equipment in his camp so he bought some and charged it to the purchase of cabbages. This was discovered and he lost his commission but through the good offices of a friend he was reinstated in time for the war.
By the way, he never had any trouble with the foot and it passed the army physical with flying colors.
My grandfather, Papa Jess, was my male role model during the war. He had been too young for the Spanish American War and too old for World War I.
Papa or Papa Jess, as all the kids in town called him, had grown up on a ranch in western Washington along with four brothers and four sisters. All the brothers wore guns and all rode black horses. While still a teenager he rode his black horse alone from Goldendale, Washington to Missoula, Montana. His precipitous departure had something to do with a woman.
He next went with his brother-in-law and sister from Missoula to Long Valley in the mountains of Idaho about 80 miles north of Boise. There he worked on the railroad, homesteaded, married a blond beauty, Rosie, from Wisconsin and raised a family.
There is a story my mother told me about Papa Jess playing cards with two other men to see who was going to have the honor of shooting the guy who had burned down the local hotel. She didn’t tell me if my grandfather shot the arsonist; probably not since the man was only wounded and, quoting my mother, “Old Doc Noggle saved his life”.
There were no social security numbers before Roosevelt and no way to keep track of people. Workers on the railroad were known by their first name only and they were paid at the end of every week in real money by their section boss. There is a grave marker in the local cemetery with the name Tim Two; there had been at least two Tim’s.
People came to Long Valley to work in the mine, to work on a ranch, to work at the sawmill, to work as a lumberjack, to grow wheat and to disappear from the outside world if they wanted to.
Basques herded their sheep on West Mountain. A Japanese family had a ranch and a store in town. Papa Jess always took his cows to Takiuchi’s bull even during the war. Finn Hall was a few miles up the valley.
There were no African-Americans in Long Valley. There were no Jews; in fact I thought that there weren’t any Jews around anymore like there weren’t any Philistines around anymore.
In all of my many grammar schools I was told that all men were created equal and I believed my teachers. The twig was bent.

When my dad went overseas, my mother, my sister and I went to Long Valley to spend the rest of the war. It never occurred to me that we might lose the war. Men like my dad and the men in his squadron in the South Pacific, men like my uncle Raymond flying in North Africa or my cousin Darrel in New Guinea, men like this didn’t lose wars. Even in retrospect, I feel that way.
The United States seemed to have such raw power; the black smoke pouring from the stacks of U.S. Steel, the logging trucks coming nose to tail out of the mountains, the clouds of B-17’s flying over Long Valley heading east, the endless trains passing through town and a citizenry that would not be denied.
When the war started the men who worked at the sawmill joined up and a group of Japanese-Americans came to replace them. I never really knew what their status was. They lived together somewhere out of town and while they weren’t prisoners neither did they come into town except on Sunday morning in the summer when Papa Jess would open up Rosie’s swimming pool, she had a tavern and a swimming pool, for the Japanese. I saw that these young men did not look like the Japanese who were portrayed on the posters in the post office. I saw that even though Papa Jess told them not to, they ran on the cement around the pool and dove off the roof of a building that was pretty close to the pool, just like the local young men used to.

Medically I grew up with mercurochrome, iodine and little packets of sulfa powder and Cuita-Cura Ointment, Papa’s universal nostrum. I never cut myself so badly that gauze, Cuita-Cura and adhesive tape wasn’t sufficient to stop the flow of blood. I didn’t have a stitch until I was a freshman college.
We worried about polio, Rocky Mountain spotted fever and Typhoid Mary. About cuts, hardly at all. When the head flew off the axe and hit Dale in the head, Cuita-Cura and adhesive tape. When the chain that a truck was using to pull a freight car broke and hit Danny across the face, Cuita-Cura and adhesive tape. I admired Danny’s scar, kind of like a German dueling scar, but his high school sweetheart, whom he married, had him have it removed after he got out of the Navy.

This is a sketch of the world I grew up in and the people I grew up around.
This world view is my benchmark for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. My opinions broadened over the next sixty years but they are always compared, for better or worse, with my first fifteen years.
This is not to say that the opinions I formed in those years are good or bad or that my formative years were ideal. My early years were just what they were and that’s all. Everybody has a unique first fifteen years that is the basis of their unique view of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This gives everybody a relationship with the Constitution; even if they don’t really know what it says; they think they know. And they think they know what is right and what is wrong, what is fair and what is not because they know how to judge those qualities in the world that they, personally live in.

My opinion on gun laws was formed as much from being around guns all my life as it was from careful rational thought.
My grandmother, Rose, was the only person in my family that ever went to church. My mother was indifferent to religion and my dad was hostile. I excise religious freedom by not participating. I don’t have an opinion one way or the other about putting The Ten Commandments on a Court House lawn.
A part of religion that I did like was Christmas Carols, which I never hear on the radio or in school programs anymore. I don’t see what the fuss is about school Christmas Programs with Christmas carols. While I didn’t believe the stories, I didn’t feel offended by them and I enjoyed singing the songs and reciting the verses from the Bible.
Papa Jess was supposed to have been named Jesse James Lefever but the preacher wouldn’t baptize him with that name so he was baptized Jesse Cleveland.
Racism is incomprehensible to me. When we moved to Cheyenne I attended an integrated junior high school but since I believed that all men were created equal I didn’t really think much about it. The cultural division in school was between the jocks and the rest of us. The jocks and their girlfriends, a very multicultural group, sat together at lunch.

So, when a Constitutional question arises I judge it in the world I live in as I have experienced it. My life in my world formed my take on what’s ok and what isn’t.

In 1790, around when the Constitution was written, the population of the United States was about 4 million. In 1950, when I turned 15, the population was 131 million and 65 thousand people lived in Phoenix. As of the last census the U.S. population is 300 million and there are as many people living in The Valley of the Sun now as lived in the entire country when the Constitution was written. (I remark in passing that China has a billion more people than The United States.)
It is a tribute to the men who wrote The Constitution for a country hugging the eastern seaboard and populated by 4 million people, that it works at all in a country of 300 million that stretches from sea to shining sea. The fact that the interpretation of the Constitution has changed over time is hardly surprising.

Any constitution requires reasonable, honorable men and women to make it work. Any constitution can be subverted by determined, dishonorable men and women.
When the Constitution was written it was not unreasonable to assume that reasonable, honorable men would be running the country. Honor was still a big deal and the country was small enough that it was hard to hide dishonor.
The men of the Constitution fought beside George Washington and the women kept the home fires burning. Their grandchildren heard Lincoln debate Douglas in person. When the Constitution was written the owners of businesses lived in the same neighborhood as the people who worked for them.
The people lived in the same world and the same country as the early presidents.
The last president I saw in person was Eisenhower at his inauguration parade. I saw Truman once when he passed through Cheyenne. The presidents since then have been images on a TV screen. I don’t live in the same country as President Bush, or the same country as John Kerry for that matter. I can’t imagine what living in the world of Rove or Chaney or Scalia would be like; I see that world but through a glass darkly. But their worlds formed their understanding of The Constitution and as we live in different worlds our understanding of The Constitution is different.

Why do people want to chip away at The Constitution? Why do they want to weaken habeas corpus, a legal concept that goes back to the Magna Charta? Why do they want to allow information obtained under duress in trials? Why do they want to allow the duress?

The ordinary citizen is propagandized by Pro-life, by Pro-choice, by national security and threats of terrorism, by Pro-gay marriage, by Pro-one man to one woman marriage, by Pro-gun, by Anti-gun and by Pro torture to name a few of those who propagandize to have The Constitution interpreted or changed to the benefit of their ends.
Unfortunately education has failed the citizens by not teaching them rational thought.