The Capitol Dome

11 THE CAPITOL DOME Rights— Lost and Found b y Ke n n e t h R . Bow l i n g Editor's note: The following piece concludes the author's two-part investigation into the modern fate of the fed- eral Bill of Rights, as both principles and parchment, since its meaning drew fresh attention around the time of its sesquicentennial in 1941. For the first part of this treatment, "Nazi Germany, the New Deal, and the Iconization of the Federal Bill of Rights," see The Capitol Dome, v. 53, 1(Summer 2016):26-32. S o what happened to the North Carolina copy of the Bill of Rights, which an attentive newspaper reporter spied on the wall of an Indianapolis office one day in 1897—and which hung, equally neglected, on the wall of an Indianapolis con- tinuing care retirement community in the 1970s and 1980s? 1 And what about the other thirteen copies that congressional clerks Benjamin Bankson and William Lambert made during the last week of September 1789? In 2000, seven states and the federal archives had their copies, but like North Carolina, the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Georgia did not. In March 2003, in a sting operation for which my "expert opinion" was the basis, the FBI confiscated the North Carolina copy and returned it to the state. 2 The New York copy almost certainly burned in the devas- tating 1911 Albany state Capitol fire that consumed so much of the state's documentary history. Georgia at some point after 1789 developed a "state of the art" filing system. It collected all the differently shaped and sized documents on a particular subject (such as communica- tions with the federal government), transcribed them directly into a blank book, and then destroyed the originals. 3 When Delaware ratified all but the first proposed Amend- ment, it simply annotated the document with its ratification and returned it to the federal government. In 2012 the National Archives sent it home for display and on the occasion of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta in 2015 loaned it to the British Library for exhibit. 4 The Pennsylvania copy was purloined from among the tens of thousands of unguarded official records housed in the Capi- tol basement at Harrisburg in the late nineteenth century and carried to New York City by train—allegedly in a carpet bag. It became part of Thomas Emmet's great manuscript collec- tion, now at the New York Public Library. In a historically important agreement with the Commonwealth of Pennsyl- vania in 2013, the Library allows it to be displayed at the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia from time to time on condition that Pennsylvania not claim for 99 years that it is its copy. Pennsylvania agreed and a generous Library trustee donated the money to construct the "terror proof" case in which it now permanently resides. 5 In 1930 Maryland's state archives sold to the famous book dealer Charles Goodspeed and Co. the cover letter that George Washington had written to Governor John Eagar Howard on 2 October 1789—along with, presumably, the Amendments it covered when sent out for Maryland's ratification. Whether or not A.S.W. Rosenbach acquired Maryland's copy of the Amendments directly from Goodspeed, or from some inter- mediary owner, he was showing the document publicly before the end of the decade. On 15 December 1943, as part of a war bond drive, hundreds of New Yorkers viewed it on the steps of Federal Hall Memorial on Wall Street, and it remained on display inside the building through January 1944. At the time of the ceremony Rosenbach announced that he had sold it to Bernie Balaban, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and the president of Paramount Pictures, on the condition that he donate it to the Library of Congress and link the gift to the war bond drive. Balaban did so in a ceremony on 21 Febru- ary 1945, noting in a speech that his feeling was "one of humble gratitude toward the freedom found by my parents

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