December 3, 2015: AmendmentStudying: Washington DC and the 23rd Amendment

[December 6^th marks the 150^th anniversary of the ratification of perhaps the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 13^th. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for five other amendments, leading up to a special weekend post on the 13^th!]

On how the 1961 amendment echoes the city’s complex history, and how it helped shift it.

From its earliest origins, the federal capital of Washington, DC has had a complex, contested identity, both within the American government and as a geographic entity. The capital was created out of both an informal political arrangement (the Compromise of 1790, in which Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson agreed that the federal government would pay all remaining state Revolutionary War debt in exchange for establishing a national capital in the South) and a couple of subsequent Congressional laws (the Residence Act, also of 1790, which formalized a 10-year plan to construct the capital; and later the Organic Act of 1801, which officially designated the newly constructed city as part of the federal government and thus its citizens as part of neither Maryland nor Virginia). And the political and geographic evolution did not end there: in 1846, for example, the Virginia General Assembly (fearing that slavery would soon be abolished in the capital) voted to accept the area known as Alexandria (which had been incorporated into DC when the capital was officially organized) back into the state; Congress agreed, and with its July vote for this “retrocession” changed all those Alexandrians from citizens of DC (and thus without Congressional representation or electoral votes for president) to Virginians.

The 23^rd Amendment to the Constitution, which passed Congress in June 1960 and was ratified in March 1961, culminated more than 70 years of Congressional efforts to address some of the political inequities captured in my first paragraph’s final parenthesis. As early as 1890, a proposal was introduced to Congress to grant DC voting rights in presidential elections; the bill did not pass, but thanks to the efforts of Washington Evening Star journalist and editor Theodore Noyes and his Citizens’ Joint Committee on National Representation for the District of Columbia, activism of behalf of this political change for the capital continued throughout the 20^th century. Yet while the 23^rd Amendment did indeed grant electoral votes to the District, it did not provide Congressional representation for the city, an issue that remains contested to this day (as illustrated by DC’s tongue-in-cheek license plate slogan). Moreover, as of 1961 Washington, DC still did not have “home rule,” meaning that residents of the city could not elect their own mayor or city council. Although this had been the case throughout the city’s complex history, the rapidly increasing percentage of African American residents during the mid-20^th century made the issue part of the Civil Rights Movement by the 1960s—a connection brought home vividly and painfully during the April 1968 riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.

Five years after those riots and twelve years after the 23^rd Amendment was ratified, Congress finally passed the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, giving DC residents the ability to elect both a mayor and a 13-member city council. In 1975, the city elected its first mayor, African American housing and civil rights leader Walter Washington; to date, seven of the city’s eight mayors have been African American, with the other, Adrian Fenty (who served from 2006 to 2010), having a mixed-race heritage. Each of these mayoral administrations deserves individual attention and analysis, of course; yet taken as a whole this history represents one of the most consistent and potent African American presences on the American political landscape. And I believe it’s fair to say that without the passage of the 23^rd Amendment, and the national attention its ratification campaign brought to the issue of DC’s political representation and voice, the move toward Home Rule and the subsequent rise of the city’s African American political establishment might never have taken place (or at least have had far less visibility and effect). The 23^rd Amendment is likely one of the least-remembered of the 27 current amendments, but its impact shouldn’t be underestimated.

Next amendment tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 2, 2015: AmendmentStudying: The 19th Amendment and the ERA

[December 6^th marks the 150^th anniversary of the ratification of perhaps the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 13^th. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for five other amendments, leading up to a special weekend post on the 13^th!]

On how the long, hard road to women’s suffrage might parallel a current political journey.

A bill proposing a Constitutional amendment that read “The right of citizens to vote shall not be abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex” was first introduced into the Senate (by California Senator Arlen Sargent, a friend and ally of suffrage activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony) in January 1878. The bill met with lukewarm reception at best from Sargent’s fellow Senators, however, and never made it out of hearings in the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections. It would be reintroduced by one like-minded Senator or another every year for the next 41 years before finally being successfully proposed (as a Joint Resolution of Congress) in May 1919, but the long road continued even after that point. Indeed, it was not until August 18^th, 1920 that the proposed amendment received its 36^th state ratification (Tennessee, thanks in significant measure to the private plea of the elderly mother of one state legislator), the two-thirds majority needed to be ratified and become the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution.

It’s not just that the suffrage amendment had such a long and uphill journey to passage and ratification, though. After all, I would bet most thoughtful 21^st century Americans could imagine how such a sweeping political change (some 10 million new voters were immediately enfranchised when the 19^th Amendment was ratified) might be controversial, even if nearly all of us (ahem) would of course now support it wholeheartedly. But what is likely far more difficult to imagine—and thus to remember, although as I argue in this Talking Points Memo piece we certainly must remember it, for its own sake and as part of a long, dark American history—is just how consistently virulent and violent was the opposition to women’s suffrage (and specifically to those activists advocating it). As late as March 1913, a suffrage march organized alongside Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration was attacked by an angry mob who cursed, spit upon, and physically assaulted many of the (overwhelmingly female) marchers, while DC police looked on. Suffrage activists were far from victims, I hasten to add—it was precisely their efforts that finally secured the vote—but these histories of violence do add one more striking layer to our understanding of how long and hard this half-century journey was.

In 1923, three years after the 19^th Amendment’s ratification, activist Alice Paul drafted a new amendment guaranteeing full equality of rights under the law regardless of sex. This Equal Rights Amendment (or ERA) was introduced into Congress every year between 1923 and 1972, when it finally passed and was sent to the states for ratification. When the time limit for ratification expired in 1982, however, only 35 of the 38 required states had ratified the ERA; the amendment has been re-introduced into every Congress since but has not yet been passed again. For those of us who support the ERA, this history of stagnation, slow and partial and ultimately incomplete progress, and repeated effort without resolution could easily feel deeply frustrating, could turn us off to the possibilities of political movement on such an amendment and issue. Yet without minimizing those frustrations and realities, I would note that the history of women’s suffrage and the road to the 19^th Amendment reveal the need and value of continuing to fight for equality and justice, even—indeed, especially—when that journey is a long and difficult one. Those fighting to secure passage and ratification of the ERA are doing precisely that, and they have history on their side.

Next amendment tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 1, 2015: AmendmentStudying: Santa Clara County and the 14th Amendment

[December 6^th marks the 150^th anniversary of the ratification of perhaps the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 13^th. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for five other amendments, leading up to a special weekend post on the 13^th!]

On the seemingly offhand sentences through which the Supreme Court radically revised American law, history, and community.

In the spring 1886, the Supreme Court heard a trio of cases related to California’s taxation of railroad corporations and properties, cases collectively entitled Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). The cases’ specifics hinged on small and (to this AmericanStudier) relatively uninteresting questions of (for example) whether fences adjoining railroad tracks were considered part of those tracks for purposes of land categorization and taxation, and the Court’s decision, written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, similarly focused on those small (if, of course, significant to the affected parties) questions. But it was in a “headnote” to that decision, transcribed by a court reporter and attributed to Chief Justice Morrison Waite, that the Court went far beyond those specific questions and helped change the course of American law and society.

In that headnote, Waite stated, “The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.” The note was not part of the Court’s official decision, but the reporter (J.C. Bancroft Davis, a former railroad company president) included it immediately preceding the decision in his transcription for the official Court record. He did so, it’s worth adding, only after writing to Waite to inquire whether it did indeed represent the Court’s collective perspective; Waite responded that it did, and the sentences became part of the decision’s text and permanent identity from then on. Such a headnote would have no legal standing or precedent—yet nonetheless, by all accounts and all available evidence this informal opinion, that corporations were the equivalent of people under the 14^th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause, became far more impactful than anything in the decision’s formal text.

Santa Clara thus represented a watershed moment in the evolving narrative of “corporate personhood,” one that saw its latest statement during the 2012 presidential primaries, in Mitt Romney’s oft-quoted remark at the Iowa State Fair that “corporations are people, my friend.” Yet I would also argue that Waite’s headnote illustrates another of the Court’s striking powers, one perhaps not part of its original Constitutional mandate but certainly part of how the Court’s role has evolved over the centuries since: the power to revise, to change our national understanding of key issues and questions. It did so here not only in the 14^th Amendment’s language (which focused entirely on “persons” and “citizens”) but also, if far more subtly, on its contexts. The Amendment, after all, was drafted first and foremost to ensure full citizenship and equal protection for freed and former slaves—for persons, that is, who had suffered at the hands of one of America’s most sweeping capitalist and, dare I say it, corporate entities, the slave system. To read that Amendment’s effects to include protection for corporations was thus, to my mind, a stunning revision.

Next amendment tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?