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Quote of the Day: Article Two, Section One, Clause Eight
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” — Presidential Oath or Affirmation, United States Constitution
Two-hundred-thirty years ago, on April 30, 1789, those words were spoken in an official capacity for the very first time, as George Washington, the duly elected President of the United States, was sworn into office. There had been a few bumps in his processional route from Mount Vernon to New York, but the swearing-in finally took place on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street, in front of a large crowd of onlookers. Following the ceremony, Washington went indoors to make his inaugural address to the assembled members of Congress. The day concluded after dark with a few fireworks and cannons.
Such a short time ago. Just 72 years after Washington’s inauguration (in 1861), war broke out between the States. Just 72 years after that (1933), Adolph Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. One-hundred-fifteen years after Washington’s inauguration (1904) and halfway between then and now, Theodore Roosevelt became the first President to win election in his own right after having been elevated to the position upon the death of his predecessor (McKinley). And now, 115 years further down the road, here we are with President Donald J. Trump.
In temporal terms, not all that much has passed since that clear and cool April day not quite two-and-a-half centuries ago. My Uncle Arthur (Dad’s brother), who was born in 1907 and died in 2009, had vivid recollection of his great-grandmother Mary, who was born in 1818 and who passed away when he was seven years old. (She was a toddler of almost two when George Washington’s old sparring partner, King George III died!) Both her parents were born before Washington was inaugurated (her father was a teenager at the time), so Arthur could recount first-hand stories given to him by their daughter of people who lived before there ever was a “President of the United States” at all.
Two-hundred-thirty years is a tiny slice of history’s arc, and yet so much has happened. You’d think, with the resources available to us, that we’d have learned something from some of it. Yet, what is happening today may be passé and discredited tomorrow. All we can do is our part and wonder what our descendants, 230 years from now in 2249, will say about us and what we did when it counted. Perhaps my granddaughter, born in 2008 will, like Grandma Mary, live a good, long life, and perhaps her story and our stories will still be being told by old codgers like Uncle Arthur, who listened to them as small children. I hope so. I can only hope we do mostly right by history and that history is kind to us.
NB: the foregoing is based on what I believe to be a fairly solid premise that “Beto” and AOC are wrong, and that we actually do have more than a dozen years left on Earth to sort things out. I can’t prove that, but I feel it in my bones, FWIW. And, of course, if they’re right, none of this matters.
Published in General
Great post! It is a sign of infantilism to see the world around you as if it came into being just now and had no reason or process for being. That is the great sin of post-modernist thought. If we do not contend with history and understand the making of our world, we cannot preserve it or amend it in any way that makes it better.
What power in that oath and in the character to fulfill that oath completely. We cannot preserve that which we do not understand. We cannot protect that which we do not know.
And yet . . . what do small children make of the words of grown ups. I can remember (and now laugh about) the strange things I thought adults were saying and misinterpreting them.
Examples, I thought when my mother said “boiled eggs” she was saying “boy eggs.” So I called them “boy eggs.”
Another time, my mother was looking at the newspaper and told me one of her high school friends was crowned “Maid of cotton.” I interpreted it as “made of cotton” and was amazed. “She’s really made of cotton?”
And later when I was 6 or 7, sitting in my uncle’s living room watching the news the newsman was talking about the Americans fighting the guerrillas in Vietnam. I interpreted this as “gorillas” and wondered what we were doing and how they could be trained to fire guns.
I can also remember asking my cousin when he was about two and staying with us while his parents went away on a trip where his mother was. The answer was “she went to see her ami.” Her ami? What his mother had said was she was going to “Miami.”
Yep. 230 years is nothing. A drop in the bucket of time.
She,
A delightful post. Do not worry, I wouldn’t trust either Beto or AOC to properly change the batteries in a flashlight. They are amazingly wrong, about this issue and so much else.
Regards,
Jim
Oh, my goodness yes. Granny used to collect the foil caps that were on all English milk bottles (the milkman would deliver them, leave them on the windowsill in the entryway, and if we didn’t get to them soon enough, the birds would perch on the rim, peck through the foil, and drink the cream off the top).
Anyhoo, Granny washed and collected these caps, in empty cereal boxes, and then sent them off for the “seeing eye dogs.” What she meant was that they went to charity for recycling, and that the Association for the Blind sold them for scrap. What I imagined was that seeing-eye dogs wore these round foil disks as eye-patches, and I couldn’t understand how making the dogs, as well as the people “blind” helped anything. It was years before I figured it out.
And apparently, it was still a “thing” until quite recently, although no more. Sad. Bet the doggies are happy that they can see, though.
My family is extremely long-lived on both sides. Mr. She calls us the Dúnedain (we’re from Tolkien country, too. In fact, the aforementioned Uncle Arthur met the great man a couple of times at the school “old-boy” reunions).
My Great Granny was born four years after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and died at the age of 99, a few months before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I was 14 when she died. What a life she had, and what changes she saw.
My brother-in-law (who’s in his 60s) still calls the fruit of the tree malus pumila, “napples.” Because as a small child he heard “would you like a napple?” And it stuck.
I am sometimes amazed at how close the adults of my childhood were to the memories of WWII. In my childishness, I was oblivious to the memories that they must have had.
I was amazed too when my daughter and I heard a song and I said “That’s Paul McCartney”. She said “No, I think the group is called Wings”.
Revised it slightly to make it more accurate. Yes, it is alternately sad and dispiriting, and mind-bogglingly frustrating, to recognize that we’re the first generation able to recreate the worlds of our parents and grandparents exactly as they happened, and to hear our forebears act and speak exactly as they did, and that we’ve apparently learned almost nothing from the experience. It’s much easier to excuse those who confounded and confused “manifest destiny” and “manifest stupidity” in a world that was without 7x24x365 instant news, where everybody was not everywhere, every moment of the day, and where sometimes people didn’t know that they were rehashing failed policies for the umpteenth time. It’s less easy to do so now. Or it ought to be, anyway.
Very true, all round.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been prouder of my granddaughter than I was last year when she made her annual request to Granny for a Halloween costume. First because, at the age of ten, she would still prefer to wear something homemade by Granny than she would some cheap and skimpy bit of commercially-produced junk that is sold by the millions at Walmart and Target.
Secondly, because she announced that, for Halloween, she’d really like to be Audrey Hepburn.
Her favorite movie, and the one she’ll watch any time and so often that I had to replace the disk, is The Music Man.
There are words like that in English, where it originally started with “N” but was parsed wrong and lost the initial letter.
Well said, thank you!
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The post-modernists view history as something that happened. It should be viewed as a multitude of things that are still organically occurring.
Completely agree. That’s why the whole “dead white male” trope is so offensive.
We do live in an amazingly young country. About 15 years ago, I met a local historian who was probably in his 90’s+. When he was young, he had met John Mosby (Gray Ghost in the Civil War) getting his haircut.
On a business trip once, I stayed in the Shellys Hotel in East Sussex. The room I stayed in had a small plaque which said something like “Renovated in 1830”. The property itself dates to 1588.
I really hope we are still around as the same Constitutional Republic in 230 years.
Me too!
Another thing that makes me realize how young this country is is an article I read (I believe it was in National Review years ago) about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. As a boy , he met veterans who fought in the American Revolution. As a Supreme Court Justice, he had a clerk by the name of Alger Hiss. The article stated that in his life, Justice Holmes knew people who worked for George Washington, and also knew people who worked for Joseph Stalin.
There are some Millennials today that claim that they have never known prosperity. In actuality, they have never known hardship. To fix what I can have begun sharing many more stories with my kids (only the eldest can remember 9/11) of what life used to be like back in the day. I don’t care if the stories are boring or I’ve told them 20 times already. It is an exposure they and their generation needs and it is better to get it through telling stories than enduring actual hardship. “Don’t tell me your bored, when I was your age all I had to play with was old tire and a handful of rocks!”
Absolutely. You’ve intuited the point of this article, which is about the importance of family stories. It’s a tiny study, and a tiny sampling, but I think there’s much wisdom here in terms of what can be done to counteract the loosening of the ties that bind:
And:
I can’t remember where I read it, but the author said that there was graffiti on the pyramids from ancient Greek tourists who were as far removed from the pyramid builders as we are from the ancient Greeks.
One of the most depressing stories I have ever heard involves this oath. When JFK was assassinated, and Federal Judge Sarah Hughes was asked to swear in LBJ the following conversation happened (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_T._Hughes):
She (Judge Hughes) said, ‘Is there an oath?’
I (Irving Goldberg) said, ‘Yes, but we haven’t found it yet.’
She said, ‘Don’t worry about it; I’ll make one up.’
I would assume that a Federal Judge would know the Constitution almost word for word by memory. Everything they do is based on that document. Plus, the Constitution is only a few pages long and almost never changes. She shouldn’t have to ask where the oath is.
As an engineer, I have to work with regulations that are thousands of pages long and changing constantly. I don’t have all of them memorized, but I am very familiar with the text. It is required to properly do my job. If the regulations were only a few pages long, I would have them memorized.
What is depressing is the fact that Federal Judges rule based on previous opinions, rather than the document that matters. The result is that the Constitution has lost much of its relevance.
Yep. That is very depressing. And one would think that more than fifty years ago would have been better than today.
@ponyconvertible, you may need to re-examine your depression. What you describe is the difference between the Anglo-Saxon stare decisis (latin for “Let the decision stand”) approach to law and the Napoleonic code approach to law. America, as part of the Anglo-sphere adopted stare decisis.
The English developed a common law where judges examined the practice of the people (and later, Acts of Parliament) to settle disputes. Part of that examination was to consider what other judges had done in disputes that were similar to the one in front of them and rule in a consistent manner. This gave the law some predictability — people had some expectation about how a court would rule in a future dispute based upon how they had ruled in the past.
In contrast, Napoleon Bonaparte created a French code of law that was to be applied by a judge in any dispute without regard to how any other judge had applied that code to a similar dispute. That system came to dominate Europe as Napoleon himself controlled it. Under a code law system the outcomes could be vastly different on similar facts if the predilections and interpretation of code differed between judges. That made predictability problematic.
Your depression arises not so much from stare decisis as from the progressive approach to judicial interpretation. That interpretation converts stare decisis into a code law approach by first changing the meaning of the earlier decisions and then applying the judge’s individual preferences. When uncorrected or adopted by an appeals court, those judges who follow stare decisis correctly are then bound by the earlier judge’s preferences. Depressing indeed.
Referees in a basketball game, may interpret the rules slightly differently. What one may say is traveling, another may say is not. However, at least they know the rule book. When judges don’t know the rule book there is a serious problem.
We The People ratified the Constitution and gave them the rules. We expect judges to rule based on what is written. We don’t have time to read and study case history, nor did we give judges the right to change the rules. We need to be able to read the rules, and then follow them.
I disagree that the is ever a case where a judge is bound by an earlier judges decision. Judges should be bound by the Constitution nothing else.