A 50s-era guide to the American Constitution gets a new lease on life.
Over sixty years ago Stanford University Press published what quickly became a definitive (and lively) illustrated guide to the U.S. Constitution; a book of enduring charm entitled Your Rugged Constitution. Moving methodically from Preamble to the 22nd Amendment, the book offers a line-by-line explanation of the Constitution’s original text with concise and accessible commentary. Originally intended to be used as a textbook, it became a classroom standby for a generation of young Americans, surviving on school syllabi until well into the 1970s.
By the turn of the millennium, however, the book had fallen into relative obscurity (well, save for a handful of wistful Amazon reviewers). Long buried in the Press’ archives, it wasn’t until recently, when the Press’ backlist was being scanned for Google, that Director Alan Harvey took notice of the book—along with all its myriad editions and translations. Struck by its novelty, he asked then Law Editor (now Editor-in-Chief), Kate Wahl if she would want to reprint it. Though the will was there, at the time, printing technology was such that a full-color reprint of the book would not have been cost-effective, yet a black-and-white version would hardly do justice to the book’s many illustrations. “But now,” says Harvey, “we can afford to print it in color and make it cool.”
Piloting the reprint today is Law and Anthropology Editor, Michelle Lipinski, who describes the book as a great historical and cultural document; “It’s a cultural chart that says just as much about the political mood of the 1950s and 1960s as it does about the Constitution itself.”
Indeed, the book remains relevant today, both for its original purpose as an easy-to-understand guide to the Constitution as well as a fascinating artifact from the midcentury United States. Your Rugged Constitution is flavored throughout by a distinctly 1950s zeitgeist, from the duo-chromatic “cartoon modern” art style, to a latent and almost whimsically optimistic attitude of American exceptionalism.
Likewise, the national neuroses of the era can also be glimpsed in these pages. The book was originally published in 1952, under the specter of the Cold War, and not long after the close of World War II. The degree to which these events shaped American consciousness shines through in passages like these:
The leaders of some foreign countries are enemies of our system of self-government. These leaders deny self-government to their own people and oppose it elsewhere in the world. There are probably even some people of this sort in our midst—people who would like to undermine our system of self-government and dictate to us what we should and should not do.
(274)
Reminiscent of a McCarthy-like creed and appearing alongside an image of faceless men engaging in what appears to be the Nazi salute (seen below), this passage goes on to assure the reader that knowing your rights, and carrying out the duties of citizenship will ward off the threat of dictatorship.
The book is rife with images such as these, animating the concepts distilled in its pages. The style, highly characteristic of midcentury print cartoons, is sleek, simple and full of hatching techniques. Powdered wig-wearing Framers appear in concert with pinstriped businessmen—a Jetsons-esque maid-robot even makes a cameo. These blue and black ink line drawings are used to convey everything from the inner-workings of the bicameral legislature to the rudiments of patent law, and according to the editor, form the “beating heart of the book.”
A publisher’s note appearing in the reissue of Your Rugged Constitution expresses the hope that this text will serve a new generation of readers interested not only in the American system of government, but also in how perspectives on the United States Constitution have unfolded over time. But it also strikes the editors as a thoroughly enjoyable volume, abundant in character and charm, and it is on the strength of that personality that this book finds itself in reissue today.
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