"A Troubled Birth": Citizens Disunited

‘We the People,” the first three words of the Constitution, were a bit of legerdemain on the part of draftsman Gouverneur Morris, but they have rightly resonated over the years, not least when the definition of “the people” was expanded by universal white manhood suffrage in the 1830s and by the enfranchisement of blacks in 1870. It’s not surprising that aristocratic European observers like Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Bryce were struck by the importance of public opinion when they visited the U.S. in the 1830s and 1880s, both decades of bitter partisan competition. For Susan Herbst, however, the key decade for enthroning the sentiments of “we the people” came much later—in the 1930s. It was then, she argues in “A Troubled Birth,” that we got stuck with the parched and crabbed notion of public opinion with which we’re still stuck today.