How did the meaning and conversation around the constitution change so dramatically? One consequence of the cultural power of narratives of American exceptionalism and national greatness is that not only are such questions rarely asked, but the answers are almost always sought internally. Since the US is so distinctive, its development, some assume, cannot be a product of international processes and comparative practices.
In truth, however, the modern veneration of the federal constitution is directly related to the US’s rise from regional power to the world’s dominant global force, in the context especially of World War II, international decolonization and Cold War conflict.
By the mid-twentieth century, an American nationalist faith had crystallized around a series of essential commitments: to market capitalism, to representative democracy, to racial equality, to the protection of individual liberties, and – crucially – to the belief that these principles grounded the US’s legitimate right to exercise an international police power wherever it saw fit.
On the face of it, these were disparate ends, which need not go together and might well be in profound tension. But the narrative that American politicians and commentators developed around the federal constitution served a critical role in cohering these ends into a single American ideology. The 1787 document became synonymous with America’s ideal form of government, the normative core of what magazine magnate Henry Luce famously dubbed the ‘American Century’.
Central to this transformation in the significance of the federal constitution was America’s claim to offer a universal model for constitution-writing, conceived of as a foundational activity in the initial construction of a self-controlling and self-representing polity.
And it’s certainly true that in 1789, when the United States adopted its federal constitution, projects of explicit constitution-writing were historical anomalies. The relative novelty of the American example created a domestic and international connection between the country and the practice of drafting constitutions. This link was further reinforced by the process by which US territories acceded to statehood. The transformation of Indigenous land into a state began with the demographic removal of Native peoples and then settlement by Anglo-Europeans, after which settlers would write and formally adopt a new constitution before seeking admission.
In this way, constitution-writing became a key marker in the process of westward expansion and the accepted precondition for recognition as equal, self-governing ‘sister’ states. By the mid-nineteenth century, constitution-making had spread as a defining political experience in the lives of many of its white male citizens – even as virtually all the state constitutions rested on the exclusion of Native peoples, of women and Black persons, whether enslaved or formally ‘free’.