Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/726123
Rights at this time, not directly associated with the sesqui- centennials, were particularly noteworthy. In 1937 Missouri Senator Champ Clark delivered to the American Newspaper Publishers Association an address on the history of the Bill of Rights. The next year Justice Harlan Fiske Stone's opinion for the Supreme Court in United States v. Carolene Prod- ucts held that the "Fourteenth Amendment 'embraced' the 'fundamental freedoms' of the Bill of Rights," mak- ing them applicable to the states while at the same time sig- naling that the New Deal Court (and it turned out, its suc- cessors) would be less interested in property rights and more inter- ested in human rights than its predecessors. Most importantly, in January 1939 historian James Truslow Adams's article, "Shield of Our Liberty: The Bill of Rights," appeared in the widely read and profoundly influential Readers Digest. 14 Franklin D. Roosevelt served as either chairman or honorary chairman of both sesquicentennial commissions and became a key voice in the iconiza- tion of the Bill of Rights. He first mentioned it in a "fireside chat" on 28 June 1934. His sesquicentennial Con- stitution Day address on 17 September 1937, in the aftermath of the "court packing" fight, declared that "nothing would so surely destroy the substance of what the Bill of Rights protects than its perversion to prevent social progress." He mentioned it several times in 1939: the annual message to Congress; the special address to Congress on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the meeting of the First Federal Con- gress on 4 March; at the opening of the New York World's Fair where he called it "sacred"; and in his address at the laying of the Jefferson Memorial cornerstone. In accepting his third term nomination by the Democratic Party conven- tion in 1940 he observed that "we must live under the liber- ties that were first heralded by Magna Carta and placed in glorious operation by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights." His last mention of the document before the sesquicentennial of its ratification was in his 1941 inaugural. 15 Along with Roosevelt, three other persons in particu- lar brought about the iconization. All were American Jew- ish leaders. This should be no surprise. They saw the Bill of Rights as protection against the legal discrimination their parents—and ancestors—had faced in the countries they emigrated from. The United States, as they and hundreds of thousands of American Jews saw it, guaranteed Jews equal citizenship under law. Herbert Bayard Swope was the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany. He launched his career as a reporter during- World War I and won the first Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1917, for his series of articles "Inside the Ger- man Empire." One of the most influential journal- ists of his generation, Swope served as editor of the innovative New York World during the 1920s. His 1921 three-week edi- torial campaign against the politically power- ful Ku Klux Klan earned the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize for public service. In retirement Swope served the United States govern- ment in various capacities, including chairing the 1941 Bill of Rights Sesquicen- tennial Commission. 16 Representative Sol Bloom of New York City's Upper East Side was the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. He established his national reputation in 1893 when he cre- ated what he named the "Midway Plaisance" at the Chicago World's Fair, a mile long fantasy of enticing games and exhi- bitions. Bloom won his seat in the House of Representatives in 1922 and served until his death in 1949, most prominently as chairman of its foreign relations committee from 1939 to 1947. He chaired the 1932 George Washington Bicentennial. Two years later he introduced a House resolution to establish a Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission. Bloom be- came its director general. In 1937 it published The Story of the Constitution and in 1940, History of the Formation of the Union under the Constitution, with his name as the author of both. In 1939 he wrote but apparently did not publish an article on the Bill of Rights. 17 Philadelphian Abraham Simon Wolf (A.S.W.) Rosenbach was the descendant of a Dutch Jew who immigrated to the city during the 1760s. By the 1930s he was the leading rare book dealer of his generation, building collections for 28 THE CAPITOL DOME Fig. 3. Herbert Bayard Swope (ca. 1920) NEW YORK WORLD-TELEGRAM AND THE SUN NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS