Throughout this year, the Wisconsin Humanities Committee has been preparing for the 1987 celebration of the bicentennial of the United States Constitution by conducting a program entitled, “The Constitution, the Individual, and the Community.” The project has involved humanities scholars from across the state in public lecture/discussion sessions designed to stimulate citizen re-examination of our nation’s fundamental political document. The scholars have presented programs that have emphasized the dual purpose of the Constitution: its role in providing a plan for organizing and perpetuating a federal government and—more central to the humanities committee’s interest—its role in mediating between individual liberties and the needs of local, regional, and national communities.
The long-range goal of the project has been to encourage leaders to develop programs for 1987 at the local level, using not only the themes and materials from the WHC’s lecture/discussion series but also those distributed nationally for the bicentennial.
Since January of 1986, the project has supported twenty-three scholarly presentations at fourteen different meetings of professional and civic organizations in Wisconsin. Among them were the Wisconsin Library Association meeting in Green Bay, the state Supreme Court’s judicial education meeting in La Crosse, and the Wisconsin Federation of Women’s Clubs in Brookfield, as well as the school district of Superior, the Madison Organization of Reporters and Editors, and the Madison Urban League.
The endeavor has not only crossed organization and regional lines in the state but also traditional disciplinary boundaries. Among the participating scholars, for example, have been historians (such as John Neuenschwander of Carthage College and Stanley Kutler of the University of Wisconsin, Madison), political scientists (Karl Anderson, UW Eau Claire and Joel Grossman, UW Madison), philosophers (Richard Feld man, UW Stevens Point), Eva Soeka of the Marquette Law School, and Ruth McGaffey of the UW Milwaukee Communications Department.
As discussion leaders, each of these scholars was asked by the WHC to focus upon one of six preselected constitutional topics (such as federalism, religious freedom, and the rights of privacy). Within that framework, they were to introduce their audiences to the topic’s historical context, the specific language of the Constitution, some of the landmark cases related to it, and current controversies centering upon that single subject.
Project planners originally intended the discussion leaders to follow the “moot court” format employed in the Annenberg television series, “The Constitution: That Delicate Balance.” The format, however, did not take into account the highly varied compositions of the project’s audiences, which not only included those with little or no knowledge of the nation’s Constitution, much less law pedagogy, but also, on occasions, justices of the state’s Supreme Court. A midcourse format correction was clearly necessary.
What the scholars eventually devised was a far more flexible program whose elements could be adapted to suit the nature and the needs of the particular audience being engaged by the WHC project. Some functioned as moderators only, basically just posing issues for their listeners to debate. In other sessions, the scholars were obliged to present brief lectures on the program topic before the audience was prepared to explore constitutional issues through debate. Whatever the format employed, the resulting programs were invariably lively.
John Neuenschwander, for example, asked participants in one session to consider the threats to privacy posed by a computerized national data bank. In another, Richard Feldman asked participants to read articles by Justice William Brennan and Attorney General Edwin Meese before opening a general discussion on “original intention” and constitutional interpretation. On the question of religious freedom, Eva Soeka asked a Common Cause meeting to consider a hypothetical legal case (Carlson v. Wauwatosa School Board) that featured a school-sponsored group that began its meeting with prayers and meditations. Whenever possible, the scholars tried to use situations from contemporary Wisconsin to emphasize the immediate implications of abstract constitutional theory.
As a part of the evaluation of these twenty-three presentations, the Wisconsin Humanities Committee, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, asked audiences if they would be willing to help plan and sponsor local programs on the Constitution in 1987. Those answering affirmatively were subsequently invited to a September 5-6 conference at Wingspread, the Johnson Foundation’s conference center in Racine. There they were presented with the full range of materials developed in the state for “The Constitution, the Individual, and the Community” project and introduced to other publications designed to foster public discussions during the 1987 bicentennial. In addition, they heard a selection of some of the twenty-three programs that had been presented across the state during the past year and were supplied with a listing of twenty-five more Wisconsin humanities scholars who are prepared to lead public discussions on constitutional themes during the bicentennial observances.
The results of this Wingspread gathering are most encouraging. Community leaders left the conference with concrete plans for staging well-informed, humanities-based programs in their localities in conjunction with the bicentennial. As these programs are scheduled across the state, the Wisconsin Humanities Committee will be able to enjoy the fruits of its careful preparations this year.
Martin Zanger is currently chair of the history department at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, and also serves as chair of the Wisconsin Humanities Committee.
