Keep the Cons in Constitution Day!

Depending on personal preference, Americans are celebrating Constitution Day or Citizenship Day today. It's the 235th anniversary of the ratification of the United States Constitution on September 17, 1787, replacing the deeply flawed Articles of Confederation with a document that has endured for more than two centuries. In spite of allowing disgruntled misanthropes to be in charge of well-regulating their own personal militiae.

The day is often marked with swearing-in ceremonies for new citizens, hence the coincidence of Citizenship Day. Since I've lived in this country all my life, and I'm not swearing in any new citizens, I'm celebrating instead by resurrecting some of the cartoons drawn for an edition of Washington Post Magazine marking the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987.

by Jeff MacNelly for Washington Post, June 28, 1987

Some of the country's leading editorial cartoonists were privileged to draw full-page, full-color cartoons to illustrate articles by the likes of Garry Wills, Roger Wilkins, Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, Frank Easterbrook and Charlie Haas.

The late Jeff MacNelly fancied the members of the Supreme Court sailing the 200-year-old S.S. Constitution through outer space with gavels for oars. (It works better as an image than in text.) I don't spot Sandra Day O'Connor or Thurgood Marshall — the sole woman and the only non-White man on the Court to that point — in his cartoon, so I'm just going to assume that MacNelly was trying to represent the overwhelming White male majority of the Court through history. 

by Pat Oliphant in Washington Post Magazine, June 28, 1987

Pat Oliphant produced this illustration of the imbalance of power that had developed between the Executive and Legislative branches since the dawn of the nuclear age. 

Nearly half of the cartoonists represented in the Post Magazine's package put then-President Ronald Reagan in their cartoons...

by Don Wright in Washington Post Magazine, June 28, 1987

...and not at all favorably.

by Doug Marlette in Washington Post Magazine, June 28, 1987

by Mike Peters in Washington Post Magazine,  June 28, 1987

That there were no cartoons featuring Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, or any other member of Congress only goes to support the point Pat Oliphant was trying to illustrate. Congress had made some attempts to reassert its prerogatives in the wake of the Nixon Watergate scandal; but with eight years in office, the Reagan administration was rather successful in reasserting the primacy of the presidency.

by Tony Auth in Washington Post Magazine, June 28, 9187

That so much of what goes on behind the scenes answers to the President rather than the legislature has had a lot to do in fostering growth over the 20th Century of the imperial Executive Branch. Tony Auth's cartoon suggests that it almost doesn't matter who —if anyone— sits behind the Oval Office desk.

(It also reminds me of the classic Saturday Night Live sketch in which Reagan, portrayed by Phil Hartman, is genial if doddering when the cameras are on, but a cunning mastermind behind closed doors.)

Leaving the presidency aside, two articles in the Post's package centered on groups excluded from the document ratified in Congress Assembled in 1787:

by Jules Feiffer in Washington Post Magazine, June 28, 1987

Roger Wilkins's essay, which Feiffer's cartoon accompanies, notes that the people pictured in paintings of the first constitutional convention "are white and male. And, no matter how powerful the celebratory culture is — and it is immensely powerful — a black American cannot help testing those images and the purported constitutional promises against the dailiness of his own life."

The words of Jemmy Madison in Feiffer's cartoon ring hollow against Wilkins's remembrance of growing up in the 1930's, '40's, and '50's.

When the Brown decision was announced on May 17, 1954, I was in my freshman year at the University of Michigan Law School. I was 22 years old. It would be three years before I would go to work in the Black slums of Cleveland and 11 before President Johnson would sent me to work among the smoldering embers of Watts. It would be eight years before the schools of Norfolk, Va., would be integrated, so my future wife — a junior high school student in 1954 — graduated from a still-segregated high school, thoroughly disillusioned. Martin Luther King was an unknown 25-year-old. He had just under 14 more years to live. It would be just over 14 years before King's Poor People's Campaign would descend on the Mall in Washington and begin the fundamental probe to find out just how big the promise of the Constitution really was and to whom it was extended.

To accompany the essay by Rose Bird, then recently having been defeated for reelection to the California Supreme Court, the Post Magazine turned to Nicole Hollander.

by Nicole Hollander in Washington Post Magazine, June 28, 1987

Not to disparage Feiffer or Hollander in the least, I do wonder whether the Post approached any Black or female editorial cartoonists for this project. Feiffer's bona fides on the issue of racial justice are without question and go back before I was born, but I suspect that an editor from the present day would have solicited Ted Shearer, Robert Pious, Brumsic Brandon Jr., or Chester Commodore.

Female editorial cartoonists of the time included Etta Hulme, Kate Salley Palmer and Signe Wilkinson. Hollander's work was not typically found on the editorial page, but her syndicated comic strip "Sylvia" (1981-2012) evolved out of her "Feminist Funnies" comic strip, and prior to that, her work as graphic designer for a feminist publication, The Spokeswoman. "Sylvia" could be every bit as topical as Feiffer's work. Hollander just didn't give presidents speaking parts in her strip.

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That's all for now. So whether you observe Constitution Day, or whether Citizenship Day is your family tradition, or even if you're stretching Mexican Independence Day throughout the weekend...

...please celebrate responsibly.