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August
21, 2003, 3:30 p.m. By Curtis Edmonds |
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PHILADELPHIA, PA. — The new National Constitution Center in Philadelphia is a squat, dull, beige, cinder block of a building that is fortunate in its location. It is near Independence Hall (and has a stunning view of that grand Georgian brick edifice from its second-floor windows), but far enough away that the contrast isn't all that stark. The real contrast is between its immediate neighbors; the scary utilitarian mass of the U.S. Mint to the east, and the good-enough-for-government-work federal courthouses to the west. The building looks good in those surroundings, which is to say that it doesn't look that good at all.
But dull architecture is one thing, dull history is another.
The National Constitution Center is thoroughly modern, up-to-date as next Wednesday, and as such is very much aware of what marketers might call its "target audience." This would be school groups bused into Philadelphia from other locations in the Northeast or making a special trip from elsewhere. (The little snack room near the front entrance of the museum is testimony to this; it looks just like a suburban school cafeteria, although the food is measurably better.) Since the children — and quite a few of the grownups — were raised in the Age of Television, the tour of the center begins with the requisite stop in a state-of-the-art theater for the requisite 15-minute video presentation, meant to "make history come alive," or some such. In this case, it's a theater-in-the-round presentation with video images projected on the floor, of the theater, on screens around the perimeter, and on a pentagonal screen that falls from the ceiling about halfway through.
What makes all this better than it could have been is that the video presentation is narrated, not by a bloodless familiar voice, but by an actual actor, pacing back and forth throughout the theater, his stentorian tones booming across the audience. It's a very theatrical touch, but it's an effective reminder that live performances by live actors are still a powerful way to get a message across, all the more so for those of us who get our entertainment via a television or movie screen.
The quality of the delivery, though, does nothing to enhance the message. The nice people who run the National Constitution Center don't appear to be interested at all in the people who actually wrote the Constitution. The center sees the Framers as individuals only at the end of the tour, where a group of bronze statues await the flashbulbs of tourists. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention, you see, despite their individual accomplishments, are primarily seen not as people but as a group. And that group, of course, is not diverse — that is to say, the Framers did not have the level of racial or sexual balance that is now the norm at enlightened institutions such as the University of Michigan Law School. That the Framers were diverse, in that they were from varied backgrounds, with different points of view, and possessed divergent ideas about the country ought to be run, cuts no ice at the National Constitution Center.
After the video is over, you exit up the stairs to the main circular exhibit hall, which is ringed with a copy of the Constitution etched into glass panels above eye level. There's a series of roughly chronological exhibits which are designed to show that the Constitution is a living document, its meaning changing from generation to generation. There is, for example, Justice Marshall's handwritten opinion from McCulloch v. Maryland, reminding us that advances in the field of word processing have done little to make judicial prose more readable. A lot of the exhibits are documents of one sort or another — the Emancipation Proclamation, some missives from citizens upset about FDR's attempt to pack the Supreme Court, an angry (unsent) letter from Harry Truman about an unfavorable decision by that Court, a cryptic White House memo from the Reagan years about the Bork nomination. Some of the exhibits are more fun, especially a display of G. Gordon Liddy's tools from the Watergate break-in, and an authentic voting machine from Palm Beach County, Florida, circa 2000.
Mixed in with the traditional exhibits are a variety of interactive displays. For example, there are several touch-screens that allow you to run down a checklist of whether a given visitor could vote for poesident in a given year. If you tell the computer that you're a woman, or black, in1919, it buzzes at you defiantly. There are also a series of screens where two painfully earnest people debate the big issues of that era — part history, part Crossfire.
Another set of exhibits sits between the outer ring and the theater. You have, for example, a mock Supreme Court bench, where you can work through an interactive presentation that allows you to work through the thought process of deciding a case. (The cases offered are Katz v. United States, a Warren-era case that limited the right of law enforcement to wiretap suspects, Texas v. Johnson, the infamous flag-burning case, and United States v. Nixon.) There's also a presidential podium where youngsters can take a virtual oath of office, and polling places where visitors can vote in a mock election for greatest president ever. (George Washington had a clear lead when I was there.)
But some of the exhibits were just strange. There was something called the "Tower of Law," which was three spiral stacks of old Federal Reporters and West's Bankruptcy Guides and United States Code Annotated volumes, meant to represent I-don't-know-what. (The number of books you have to read in law school, maybe.) There was an abstract metal Mobius loop with trucks that was meant, possibly, to represent the confusion of anyone who has had to read the many Supreme Court cases that deal with interstate trucking. Oddest of all was the "Common Defence" section, which displayed the flags of the different branches of the armed service without any sort of acknowledgement that the Constitution is only a "living document" so long as men and women will fight and die to protect it.
The National Constitution Center is devoted to the living nature of the Constitution, and the latter part of the tour focuses primarily on civil rights, pausing only momentarily to take a swipe at Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon here and there. However, there is little or nothing about two of the biggest upheavals in the Court's history. There is one little blurb about Mapp v. Ohio, which applied the "exclusionary rule" for evidence taken in illegal searches to the states, but there is almost no other record of the Warren Court's revolution in criminal jurisprudence. (There is an "Impeach Earl Warren" button.) And there is likewise one small fragment of information about Roe v. Wade, but there is no exhibit along with it, or much of anything about the Constitution's role in the debate over abortion.
What you do have are a series of objects and items from a variety of 20th-century protest movements, everything from antiwar protesters (Vietnam, not Iraq — or not yet) to the American Indian Movement. And, for some reason, wedged in amongst the mementoes of protests back, was a white Stetson. I assumed that it was the famous hat of the late disability-rights advocate Justin Dart — which would not have been out of place — but it wasn't. The display said that it belonged to Ronald Reagan, and was worn at the 1984 Republican Convention in Dallas.
That's when it hit me, that's when I understood. The right-thinking, diverse, inclusionary, politically correct people who run the National Constitution Center so badly wanted to ensure that no one was left out that they included conservatives and conservatism in their display of diversity. Of course! According to the diversity groupthink that seems endemic to the National Constitution Center, conservatives are just another part of the great national mosaic, just another special-interest group that has to be recognized and taken into account by the Establishment.
That probably wasn't the lesson that the National Constitution Center wanted me to take away from the exhibit, but it was enlightening nonetheless. I walked out of the exhibit hall, signed my name in "Signer's Hall" and went down to the gift shop.
— Curtis Edmonds is a former aide to Governor George W. Bush and writes movie reviews at txreviews.com.