-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Norman L. Rosenberg, Peaceful Revolution: Constitutional Change and American Culture from Progressivism to the New Deal. By Maxwell Bloomfield. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. xiv, 209 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-674-00304-7.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Pages 1115–1116, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700488
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Peaceful Revolution links two scholarly projects that have recently received increased attention in legalconstitutional studies: understanding the dynamics of constitutional change and mapping the cultural domain of constitutionalism. In contrast to other recent studies such as Robert Lipkin's Constitutional Revolutions (2000) and Paul Kahn's The Cultural Study of Law (1999), this slim volume avoids extensive theoretical discussion. For better or for worse, it largely ignores the voluminous literature coming from fields such as critical cultural studies of law and law and literature. Instead, Maxwell Bloomfield's book embraces a fairly traditional approach to works of popular culture (novels, plays, motion pictures, cartoons, and newspapers) in order to highlight the way in which they provided “cultural foundations” of “the ‘constitutional revolution’ of the 1930s.”
Popular materials provide “an important imaginative dimension to constitutional discourse” and show that Americans “share a strong rights consciousness and a faith in the constitutional process as a peaceful remedy for even the most divisive political controversies.” Although works of popular culture “do not generally originate proposals for constitutional change at the national level,” they do “interpret important issues in terms that will be meaningful for their respective audiences.” Thus, the debate over constitutional change that took place from the Progressive Era to the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was located not simply in court decisions, law reviews, and legal treatises but in novels such as Edward Mandell House's Philip Dru (1912) and silent films such as Votesfor Women (1912), in which Jane Addams made her movie debut. In response to Woodrow Wilson's “war socialism,” the popular constitutional culture of the 1920s, this study argues, urged a “kind of constitutional counterrevolution” in which the power of the national government was to be reined in dramatically. Works as diverse as Arthur Train's novel The Needle's Eye (1924), James M. Beck's popular history The Constitution of the United States (1924), and Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie comic strip all preached, albeit in different ways, the cause of limited constitutional government. With the economic collapse of the late 1920s and early 1930s, however, radical works such as the Elmer Rice play We , the People (1933) and the Paramount Pictures film The Phantom President (1932) challenged the “constitutional conservatism” that had dominated the popular constitutional imagination during the twenties.
