Montesquieu's Natural Rights Constitutionalism

Summary

Introduction

In 1900, on the eve of the twentieth century, E. L. Godkin—founder and longtime editor of The Nation and for sixteen years editor-in-chief of The New York Evening Post—surveyed the American political landscape, as he had so often done in the four decades preceding, and registered profound dismay. “The Declaration of Independence,” he wrote, “no longer arouses enthusiasm; it is an embarrassing instrument which requires to be explained away. The Constitution is said to be ‘outgrown.’ “ Those who once “boasted that it had secured for the negro the rights of humanity and of citizenship” now listen “in silence to the proclamation of white supremacy” and make “no protest against the nullifications of the Fifteenth Amendment.”

Godkin's observations were both accurate and prescient. They reflected the impact of Progressivism and forecast its consequences. He did not live to witness the 1912 presidential campaign. Had he done so, he might have been inconsolable. For the victor in that contest went all out in his campaign in an attempt to educate the American people in the principles underpinning the species of thinking that regarded the Declaration as an embarrassment, the Constitution as an anachronism, and white supremacy as a consummation devoutly to be wished. “We are in the presence of a new organization of society,” Woodrow Wilson told prospective voters. This generation is witness to “a new social stage, a new era of human relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life,” in which “the old political formulas” do not apply.