Goldwin, Robert A. : American Enterprise Institute

Robert A. Goldwin is a resident scholar of constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute . He has served in the White House as special consultant to the president and, concurrently, as adviser to the secretary of defense. He has taught political science at the University of Chicago and at Kenyon College and was dean of St. John's College in Annapolis. He is the editor of more than a score of books on American politics, senior editor of the AEI series of volumes on the Constitution, and author of numerous articles, many of which appear in Why Blacks, Women, and Jews Are Not Mentioned in the Constitution (AEI Press, 1990).

"From Parchment to Power is one of those increasingly rare books about American constitutional matters...This is constitutional history as it used to be written�, compellingly and convincingly."

� L. McDowell, The Washington Times

"In this elegant essay on the Bill of Rights, Robert Goldwin distills a lifetime of reflecting about the first principles of republican government into an engaging primer on the origins, ironies, and deeper meanings of the first ten Amendments. For Goldwin, the Bill of Rights is less a catalog of liberties and privileges than a fitting tribute to James Madison's acute grasp of the imperatives of constitution making."

� N. Rakove, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Original Meanings

"A thoughtful and authoritative account of Madison's statesmanship...Aided by life-long reflection, fresh observations and surprising inferences, Robert Goldwin explains those documents not as patchwork compromise but as a single whole of Madison's creation and persuasion, a triumph of democratic deliberation and extraordinary leadership."

� C. Mansfield, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government, Harvard University

"Well known to historians of the founding era,...Robert Goldwin demonstrates that the adoption of the Bill of Rights was an integral part of...constitution making in America, necessary to the establishment of a stable constitutional order."

� Rahe, Visiting Professor of History, Yale University

"This study of how the Constitution and Bill of Rights came about politically is a winner. It has the mixture of policy, politics, anecdotes, and people that makes for good reading. It is uncannily relevant to today's political debates over process and gridlock."

� Merrill, President and Publisher, Washingtonian Magazine

"A gem of scholarship that deepens our understanding of the founding, showing how the miracle of the summer of 1787 required a second miracle in the summer of 1789."

� W. Ceaser, Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia

"How the arts of political calculation were deployed by wise and conscientious men to procure the ratification of the founding document is the story told with crystal clarity and solid scholarship by Robert Goldwin. This valuable book is candid but not censorious about the crafty means by which the high end was achieved."

� Cropsey, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago

American Enterprise Institute Web Site

March, 2000

This book tells the story of how the Bill of Rights was amended to the Constitution and, more important, it explains how that addition completed the Constitution by clarifying the status of the American people.

The author is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the senior editor of the AEI Press series A Decade of Study of the Constitution.

From Parchment to Power is a book about the making of the Constitution of the United States and its Bill of Rights. The book began as a straightforward account of why and how the first ten amendments were added to the Constitution, but it unavoidably became much more than that. It developed into an account of what is required, in thought and action, for a people and their political leaders to make an enduring constitution establishing a democratic republic. As the story unfolds, we see how James Madison thought through, and then implemented, a design to put the Constitution on the firmest possible foundation, a foundation of popular support so solid that the Constitution has lasted incomparably longer than any other in the world.

The newly constituted government of the United States was just getting underway in May 1789. The Constitution had been ratified by eleven states; congressional elections had been held; the electoral college had met and voted; President George Washington had been inaugurated; and the First Congress was in session, with the Federalists, supporters of the Constitution, enjoying an overwhelming majority in both houses of Congress--five-to-one in the House of Representatives and ten-to-one in the Senate. One would think that affairs were off to a splendid start.

And yet James Madison was deeply concerned that the entire constitutional enterprise was in serious danger. The ratification process had produced harsh controversies and bitter resentments that had not been resolved or softened. In three major states, ratification had been achieved by dramatically narrow margins--by 19 votes out of 355 in Massachusetts, by 10 votes out of 168 in Virginia, and by 3 votes out of 57 in New York. And the opponents of ratification had not given up their efforts to make radical changes in the Constitution.

In the first weeks of the first session of the First Congress, the legislatures of both Virginia and New York submitted applications to Congress to call a new constitutional convention for proposing amendments, as provided for in Article V of the Constitution. Madison was seriously disturbed that there was strong public opinion in favor of this movement for a second convention; a substantial minority of the general public supported the movement because they were very uneasy about the safety of their individual rights under an unfamiliar new government.

In the face of this situation, Madison began to implement his plan to save the Constitution by proposing his own set of amendments. He had two objectives: to block the amendments others were proposing, which would have made radical changes in the Constitution; and to win the support of the general public by securing the adoption of his own amendments, which he carefully designed to change not one word in the original Constitution.