By 1900, discussions of the Constitution focused on many of the same anti-democratic ills that are currently part of political debate. The Civil War had underscored the explicit failures of the founding compromise. The effects of industrialization and resulting class conflict also raised fundamental issues about the legitimacy of the prevailing order. The system’s endless veto points made it nearly impossible for the poor to use elections to better their lot, while business elites wielded outsized power at virtually every level of government.
Even Euro-Americans who accepted as given their society’s racial hierarchy increasingly questioned the Constitution. These years saw the growth of a substantial cottage industry of constitutionally skeptical scholarly and journalistic writing contending that the document was nothing less than “a class instrument directed against the democracy,” as the Progressive era historian Vernon Parrington wrote. In the early twentieth century, it would have been easier to imagine the old text being rewritten than to conceive of a twenty-first-century America that deifies the Constitution as embodying commitments to “colorblind” equal liberty.
What changed? Such questions are rarely asked, and when they are the answers almost never look to the outside world. Since the United States is so distinctive, its development, some assume, cannot be a product of international processes and comparative practices. In truth, however, alongside domestic developments, the modern veneration of the Constitution is directly related to the rise of the United States from regional power to the world’s dominant global force over the course of two world wars, international decolonization, and the Cold War.
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the collapse of the old European imperial powers as well as the rise of national resistance movements across the Global South. In this brave new world, both formerly colonized peoples and Western governments needed to reconstruct their national stories and positions. Emerging states sought to foster identities and institutions that were politically coherent and legible at the international level. Similarly, in an effort to gain influence and moral authority, the United States and the European imperial powers had to recast their countries’ narratives in ways that resonated around the world.
In this context, constitution-writing became central to America’s global identity. To an important degree, constitution-writing—conceived of as a foundational activity in the construction of a self-controlling and self-representing polity—had already attained a symbolic status in American life. When the United States adopted its federal Constitution in the late eighteenth century, constitution-writing projects were historical anomalies. The document marked the United States as an experiment distinct from most European polities.