Reframing the history of the U.S. Constitution

NEED PROOF THAT THE FOUNDERS NEVER INTENDED FOR THE DOCUMENT TO BE THE LAST WORD? JUST LOOK TO ARTICLE 5, ARGUES HISTORIAN JILL LEPORE

- HAMILTON CAIN

HARVARD'S JILL LEPORE is a triple threat: lauded historian, prominent legal scholar and New Yorker journalist.

She approaches the American experiment from myriad angles, drawing on protagonists such as Jane Franklin, Ben Franklin's precocious sister, and the Simulmatics Corp., whose pioneering computer algorithms still shape our reality. Her 15th book, "We the People," a history of the U.S. Constitution, may be her best yet, a capacious work that lands at the right moment, like a life buoy, as our ship of state takes on water. She's not here to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic; she's here to convey - in vigorous, crystal-clear sentences - what we're losing, and why. Mayday call or a map forward?

"Of the nearly two hundred written constitutions, the Constitution of the United States - the most influential constitution in the world - is also among the oldest, a relic," Lepore asserts in her opening. "But the U.S. Constitution is neither bone nor stone. It is an explosion of ideas. Parchment decays and ink fades, but ideas endure; they also change." From this bold declaration she unspools her thesis: The Constitution was not freeze-dried at the beginning but instead has bloomed and grown to meet the republic's needs, as the framers foresaw. Article 5, which provided for amendment, underscores their intentions.

She recreates the spectacle of the 1787 convention in Philadelphia, the ceaseless harangues between North and South, bringing to life these visionaries - white, affluent men, many drama queens - as they laid out an unprecedented polity. Article 5 emerged from the "three most fateful compromises of the convention. It protected the slave trade. It granted both small states and slave states disproportionate power over the amendment process. And it made the small states' disproportionate power, in the form of unequal suffrage in the Senate, untenable."