Glenn Beck - Miracles and Massacres - True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

That is one reason why I chose to write this book in a narrative style. I want people to read these stories and feel as if they were there beside the characters. I don’t want people to just read about Tokyo Rose in a textbook, I want them to understand who she really was and why she made the decisions she did. Only once you have that context can you judge whether history has treated her properly.

The same goes for most of the other people found in the stories in this book. Even if you’ve heard of the Battle of Wounded Knee, for example, you may not have really understood the roles that people like General Miles and Colonel Whitside played. And what about Thomas Edison? Are all sides of his complex life talked about or do most people only know him as a gentle genius inventor?

Americans weren’t always so ill educated. We used to know our past. We used to understand the Constitution and unapologetically teach our children that it was the greatest and most enlightened system of government ever created.

In 1828, Arthur J. Stansbury, a Presbyterian minister from New York, wrote the “Elementary Catechism on the Constitution of the United States.” This work consists of 322 questions and answers on the Constitution and the functioning of our federal government. It was written with the explicit intention of being a concise and simple guide for use in public schools.

I found this catechism so fascinating and eye-opening that I wanted to include a small excerpt of it here. I think it’s a sad statement on our priorities as a nation that the answers found in it demonstrate a far greater understanding of the Constitution and history than the vast majority of adult Americans have—let alone our children.

Preface

That a people living under a free government which they have themselves originated should be well acquainted with the instrument which contains it, needs not to be proved. Were the system, indeed, very cumbrous and extensive, running into minute detail, and hard to be retained in the memory, even this would be no good reason why pains should not be taken to understand and to imprint it upon the mind but when its principles are simple, its features plain and obvious, and its brevity surpassing all example, it is certainly a most reprehensible negligence to remain in ignorance of it.—Yet how small a portion of the citizens of this Republic have even a tolerable acquaintance with their own Constitution? It has appeared to the author of the following sheets that this culpable want of acquaintance with what is of such deep interest to us all, is to be traced to the omission of an important part of what ought to be an American education, viz. the study of the civil institutions of our country.—We prize them, it is true, and are quite enough in the habit of boasting about them: would it not be well to teach their elements to those whose best inheritance they are?

The following work has been prepared with a view to such an experiment. It is written expressly for the use of boys, and it has been the aim and effort of the writer to bring down the subject completely to a level with their capacity to understand it. Whether he has succeeded the trial must show. He has purposely avoided all abstruse questions, and has confined himself to a simple, commonsense explanation of each article.

[…]

Q31. What was the change produced by the Revolution?

A. The different Colonies became each a free state, having power to govern itself in any way it should think proper.

Q32. Had not one state any power over the other?

A. None at all—and the several states might have remained entirely distinct countries, as much as France and Spain.

Q33. Did they?

A. No. Having been led to unite together to help each other in the war, they soon began to find that it would be much better for each of them that they should all continue united in its farther prosecution, and accordingly they entered into an agreement (which was called a Confederation ) in which they made some laws which they all agreed to obey; but after their independence was obtained, finding the defects of this plan, they called a Convention in which they laid a complete plan for uniting all the states under one general government—this plan is called the federal constitution. On this great plan, or Constitution the safety and happiness of the United States does, under Almighty God, mainly depend: all our laws are made by its direction or authority; whoever goes contrary to it injures and betrays his country, injures you, injures me, betrays us all, and is deserving of the heaviest punishment. Whoever, on the contrary, loves and keeps it sacred, is his country’s friend, secures his own safety, and farthers the happiness of all around him. Let every American learn, from his earliest years, to love, cherish and obey the Constitution. Without this he can neither be a great or a good citizen; without this his name will never be engraved with honor in the pages of our history, nor transmitted, like that of Washington, with praises and blessings to a late posterity.

[…]

Q99. Is not this a better way of making the laws of a Country, than either of those we first considered?

A. It is hard to conceive how greater care could be taken that no wicked, unjust, oppressive, hasty, or unwise Law should pass. There is full time to consider whatever is proposed; such fair opportunity to oppose it, if wrong, and improve it, if imperfect; so many persons, and from so wide a space of country must agree in approving it, that it is scarcely possible any thing very injurious can be enacted; or, at least, if it is, that a different form of Government would have prevented it.

Q100. Are there not some evils which attend this mode?

A. Nothing of human contrivance is wholly free from some defect or other; and, in time of war, when the public danger is great, and it is needful that Government should act, not only wisely, but rapidly; some disadvantage may be found to arise from so deliberate a method of passing every Law. But it is far better to put up with this, than to lose the precious blessing of so free and safe a mode of Legislation.

Q101. You have said that no Laws can be made for the United States, but by Congress; may Congress make any Laws they please?

A. No. Their power is limited by the Constitution; that is, they have no power, but what the Constitution says they have. It must always be remembered, that the States, when they united to form the General Government, had full power to govern themselves; and that they gave up only a part of their power , for the general welfare. Whatever power, therefore, is not given by the Constitution, to the General Government, still belongs either to the State Governments, or to the people of the United States.

[…]

Q150. Suppose any American citizen is seized and put in prison, may he be kept there as long as those who seized him think fit?

A. No; he may get a writ of Habeus Corpus.

Q151. What is that?

A. It is a command from Court, by which the jailor is forced to allow the prisoner to be brought up before a Judge, that the cause of his being put in prison may be examined into; in order, that if there is no law to keep him there, he may immediately be set at liberty.

Q152. Must this command be given whenever it is applied for?

A. Yes, except at certain times, when this privilege is suspended ; (that is, interrupted for a time, but not taken away).

Q153. When may this right of having a writ of Habeus Corpus, which belongs by the Constitution to every citizen, be suspended?