On September 17, the little known holiday of “Constitution Day,” Skidmore College Political Science Professor Beau Breslin’s new book was the subject of Skidmore’s academic celebration. The book, titled “A Constitution for the Living,” takes up the theme of generational Constitutional reform and explores the theoretical history of the Constitution had it been re-ratified every generation.
Three of the best minds in Constitutional law and theorism were on a panel moderated by Skidmore Professor of Political Science Flagg Taylor—the panelists included the chair of Skidmore’s Political Science Department and aforementioned author Beau Breslin, Cornell University Political Science Professor Keith Whittington, and Henry Chambers, Professor of Law at the University of Richmond. Professor Taylor opened with an impressive list of credentials for each of the panelists.
According to all the panelists, the most interesting thing about Professor Breslin’s book is its counterfactual structure, a phrase which refers to works that attempt to make claims about how history could have played out differently under alternative circumstances. While introducing his book, Professor Breslin commented on the uncertain nature of this type of writing: “I do not claim that what I have written will be the best and only version [of this potential history]... what I do claim is that, at least in my mind, these are rational claims.”
In his initial commentary on the book, Hank exclaimed that the “reader immediately starts thinking ‘b-b-but what if?’” referring to the fact that many assumptions in the book could easily have gone a different way. Both panelists made the point that many of the factors that Professor Breslin considered, such as who could be involved in various constitutional processes, the social dynamics between the participants, where the events were held, the presidents under which they presided, and countless other internal factors in American politics, could drastically alter the outcome of the conventions if any one of them were changed even slightly. “Would Abraham Lincoln have held a convention before the South rejoined the Union?” or “Would a convention have been held under Theodore Roosevelt when he became president as a result of assassination?” demonstrate a couple of the questions about the historical contexts of the proposed conventions that were asked.
Jennifer Delton, a Skidmore history professor who attended the event, commented, “As one of the panelists suggested, contingency, which refers to an unplanned or unexpected turn of events, throws a wrench in Breslin's case studies.’”
There was an agreed upon positive to the structure of Professor Breslin’s book: it was widely accessible to a non-academic audience. Professor Whittington said it “allows folks with a passive familiarity with history or the Constitution to read,” and Professor Chambers added that, due to its story-like narrative, it was a “terrific experience to read it.”
One theme that repeatedly emerged was how our Constitution has evolved on its own without these imagined conventions, and how this compared without Professor Breslin’s hypothesized version of history. Professor Breslin’s book paints each constitutional convention as a major push for primarily progressive changes to the Constitution, but Professor Whittington asserted that one of the strengths of our Constitution is the malleability of its meaning, stating that “we have the same words as we did in 1787, but the words from 1787 don’t fit together the way they did in 1787… the document today is so different that we arguably have a Constitution for the living.”
Professor Delton added that progressives have had much success in changing the Constitution to match new beliefs, saying that “many of [progressive reformers’] imaginings became policy and reality. Indeed, Progressive Era reformers managed to propose and ratify FOUR amendments between 1913 to 1920.”
Professor Breslin acknowledged this point during the event, and afterwards commented that the focus of the history presented in his book was more on the forms in which constitutional changes would have taken place than the changes themselves. The principle difference in the evolution of the Constitution, had it evolved in the manner Professor Breslin outlined in his book, would be infrequent but major leaps in progress, with inconsistent progress in between. For instance, Supreme Court decisions would be much less monumental as their interpretations of the Constitution could be rendered useless by each constitutional assembly. However, social and political movements would rally around conventions and create large national pushes for constitutional reforms during these time periods.
Overall, the consensus seemed to be that “A Constitution for the Living” allows its readers to imagine how our Constitution could be different and question our own constitutional systems. It was described by all who commented as a book with unique form, bold claims and a diligently researched timeline of an alternate history. Professor Delton summed up a sentiment that seemed to be shared by the other panelists in her comment, “I admire Professor Breslin's attempt to imagine a different world in our own era of inequality and chaos.”