The Capitol Dome

Summer 2016

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27 THE CAPITOL DOME A 1927 letter to the editor captures the issue nicely: "the Bill of Rights, commonly known as the first Ten Amend- ments." 7 The 700th anniversary of Magna Carta in 1915 pro- vided an obvious occasion to refer to it as the ancestor of the Bill of Rights. In 1928, newspaper articles announced a New York City lecture on it and credited the First Federal Congress (1789–1791) for affixing it to the Constitution. 8 As early as 1902 a Democrat called the Democratic Party an expression of its principles. During the 1912 presidential campaign a Republican described a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party as someone who "despises the Bill of Rights." A year earlier a Socialist Party spokesman had asserted that when the United States became a socialist republic, little of the Constitution and none of the Bill of Rights would have to change. 9 Some of the public policy debates in which participants referred to the Bill of Rights include the treatment of anarchists, prohibition, military justice reform, the Ku Klux Klan, the right to bear arms, territorial governance, and the Great War in Europe. 10 Three others are of particular interest. In a 1908 brief to the Supreme Court in an anti-trust case, Standard Oil argued that a fine imposed on it by a federal district court violated the Bill of Rights. A year later British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst told a Boston audience that the right of American women to vote was based on the Bill of Rights. And during the fight over the League of Nations and ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, former Repub- lican Attorney General George Wickersham noted that the first Ten Amendments formed "what may be termed" the Constitution's bill of rights and argued in defense of treaty ratification that we should follow the lead of the founders: ratify and then amend. 11 Certain usages of the terms are especially significant because of the context or person involved. In 1915 Sena- tor Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts published an essay, "The Constitution and the Bill of Rights." An article in 1919 declared that a large body of American public opinion believed that the Bill of Rights "has been flagrantly violated during the last few years." As early as 1923 naturalization officers began to suggest "that the so-called Bill of Rights in the Constitution should be given prominence and thoroughly explained" to immigrants. 12 That the Bill of Rights was not yet on the level of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence is best sym- bolized by a 1921 event. So that Americans could view them, President Warren Harding transferred the latter two docu- ments to the Library of Congress from the Old Executive Office Building. The Bill of Rights remained behind. 13 As concern about the rise of Nazi Germany mounted in the mid- and late 1930s, particularly among American Jews, the Bill of Rights became the focus of much greater media attention, especially during the sesquicentennials of the Con- stitution (1937–1939) and the Bill of Rights (1941). It was in the fertile soil of 1937–1941 that the term Bill of Rights set deep roots. Some events making Americans aware of the Bill of Fig. 1. This cartoon appeared in the Washington Herald in the 1930s. THE WASHINGTON HERALD Fig. 2. This cartoon by Edmund Waller "Ted" Gale appeared in the Los Angeles Examiner on December 15, 1938. LOS ANGELES EXAMINER

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