CHAPTER ]1<br >The Problem of Constitutionalism<br > in American Culture<br >ALTHOUGH THE FOUNDERS DIFFERED OVER MANY important matters，<br >they shared a belief that the constitutional system created between I787<br >and I79I (when the Bill of Rights received approval) should be fully<br >comprehensible to the American people. At the close of his first inaugu-<br >ral address Thomas Jefferson called the Constitution "the text of civil in-<br >struction-the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust."<br >That is， those entrusted with responsibility for public affairs. More re-<br >cently Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts， writing in I93o， observed that<br >"the Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words<br >and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from<br >[their] technical meaning ，，1<br > The recurrence of such assertions obliges us to raise this candid<br >question: To what extent has our constitutional system， in reality， served<br >as a text of civil instruction? I contend that the Constitution occupies an<br >anomalous role in American cultural history. For almost two centuries it<br >has been swathed in pride yet obscured by indifference: a fulsome rhetoric<br >of reverence more than offset by the reality of ignorance. One American<br >woman， while travelling abroad in t 840， heaped lavish praise upon "our<br >own glorious Constitution (whose every article should be held as sacred and<br >unchangeable as were the laws of the Persian and the Mede)." School-<br >books of that era often stated that the Constitution had been divinely in-<br >spired. Their authors could not refer to ~e Constitution without a choral<br >vocabulary of "revered， glorious，" and "sacred. 2<br > Those very same schoolbooks， however， also contained all sorts of<br ><br >