Wrapped in the Flag by Claire Conner

Author:Claire Conner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807077511
Publisher: Beacon Press

Pizza and beer helped my attitude but did nothing to change my problem: Dr. Kendall did not like me. Ironically, my brother—as much a Birch baby as I was—escaped Kendall’s needling. I couldn’t figure out how that worked until I watched Kendall arrive at a party with his entourage of enthralled students in tow. At the front of the pack was my brother, laughing at every comment that tumbled out of Kendall’s mouth, scurrying to refill his glass, and spouting as many Kendallisms as he could.

“The boys adore Dr. Kendall,” I said to a friend.

“Yes, they do,” she answered. “Just look at them, fawning over him. Aren’t they jackasses?”

“For sure,” I said. “Every last one of them.”

“Dr. Kendall, too,” she added.

“I know. He’s the worst.”

A few weeks into the semester, I realized how little I knew about political philosophy and the colonial period, a situation I attempted to remedy with diligent study. Plowing through The Federalist Papers proved to me that the founders of our country, so revered now, had fought like cats and dogs over the principles of our new government. It was a miracle, from my perspective, that we ever got a functioning federal structure at all.

Willmoore Kendall used his lectures to drive home one of his core ideas: the Constitution of the United States stood head and shoulders above the Declaration of Independence in importance. He passionately believed that the “all men are created equal” clause from the Declaration was never a defining idea in American governance. In fact, he went so far as to declare the whole business of individual rights and equality to be “false, liberal criteria.”33

Kendall said the defining principle of the United States was “self-government by virtuous people deliberating under God.”34 Those virtuous souls were the ones who spoke in the first three words of the preamble, “We the People.”

I’d read those words many times. In fact, I’d memorized the entire preamble and recited it as part of declamation exercises in grammar school and high school. Before 1964, I’d given the founders kudos for their wisdom in including all the people in the Constitution.

It was in Dr. Kendall’s class that I bumped up against one of the realities of colonial America—“We the People” actually included only a small group of citizens, those who were white, male property owners over the age of majority, an age determined by each state legislature.35

According to the first census, in 1790, free women made up 40 percent of the population and free men under the age of sixteen were 20 percent.36 Twenty percent of the people were slaves, but for purposes of electoral representation, each one was considered as 60 percent of a free human. Don’t even look for information about Native Americans; no one bothered to count them at all.

Quick addition and subtraction proved that those lauded words, “We the People,” really meant “We—the 20 percent or less—of the People.”

“Guess what,” I reminded myself. “You, your sisters, and your mother were not part of that ‘We.’”

Kendall left little doubt that he would have preferred an America governed in the old colonial way.

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