The Heart of the Constitution: How the Bill of Rights became the Bill of Rights

by Gerard Magliocca

This is the untold story of the most celebrated part of the Constitution. Until the twentieth century, few Americans called the first ten constitutional amendments drafted by James Madison in 1789 and ratified by the states in 1791 the Bill of Rights. Even more surprising, when people finally started doing so between the Spanish-American War and World War II, the Bill of Rights was usually invoked to justify increasing rather than restricting the authority of the federal government. President Franklin D. Roosevelt played a key role in that development, first by using the Bill of Rights to justify the expansion of national regulation under the New Deal, and then by transforming the Bill of Rights into a patriotic rallying cry against Nazi Germany. It was only after the Cold War began that the Bill of Rights took on its modern form as the most powerful symbol of the limits on government power.
These are just some of the revelations about the Bill of Rights in Gerard Magliocca's The Heart of the Constitution. For example, we are accustomed to seeing the Bill of Rights at the end of the Constitution, but Madison wanted to put them in the middle of the document. Why was his plan rejected and what impact did that have on constitutional law? Today we also venerate the first ten amendments as the Bill of Rights, but many Supreme Court opinions say that only the first eight or first nine amendments. Why was that and why did that change?
The Bill of Rights that emerges from Magliocca's fresh historical examination is a living text that means something different for each generation and reflects the great ideas of the Constitution--individual freedom, democracy, states' rights, judicial review, and national power in time of crisis.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Law

256 pages, Hardcover

Published January 18, 2018

Reviews

[Bill Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reveals details lost to most of us and never addressed in schools. Useful constrast of the freedoms from tyranny compared to FDR's four freedoms and economic bill of rights which essentially would have made each citizen a vassal of the tyrannical Federal bureaucracy. Socialists are still pushing these programs.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Legal Scholar Gerard Magliocca published The Heart of the Constitution: How the Bill of Rights Became the Bill of Rights in 2018. Magliocca’s book traces how Americans’ views of the Bill of Rights changed over time. The book traces the history of the Bill of Rights from the English Declaration of Rights of 1689, which limited the powers of King James II. The English Declaration of Rights influenced the Bill of Rights which were passed by different states of the early United States. These Bills of Rights influenced the version of the Bill of Rights added to the United States, which was written by James Madison. During the early 19th Century, Americans had different views on what documents would be considered the Bill of Rights in the United States. Magliocca writes, “After the Civil War, the Bill of Rights was a touchstone for thinking about how the Fourteenth Amendment would reshape the Union” (Magliocca 7). Later in the 19th and early 20th Century, the Bill of Rights influenced how Americans “justified imperialism” (Magliocca 75-88). This is the title of Chapter 6. President Franklin Roosevelt was a key figure in how Americans think about the Bill of Rights. Roosevelt references the Bill of Rights to “defend the New Deal” (Magliocca 89-100). Roosevelt later used references to the Bill of Rights to justify the war against Fascist Germany and Japan. The book's title comes from a quote from Justice Hugo L. Black, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Roosevelt (Magliocca 7, 96, 115). The book traces the history of Americans' views of the Bill of Rights through the rest of the 20th Century and into the early 21st Century. The epilogue contains some subtle ideas from Magliocca and how the Bill of Rights may be developed to meet the changing political and social needs of the United States in the 21st Century (Magliocca 147-153). The book contains illustrations, a section of notes, a bibliography, and an index. The book includes the Bill of Rights along with three appendixes. The appendixes are the English Declaration of Rights of 1689 (Magliocca 153-156), the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 (Magliocca 157-161), and the United Nations’ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Magliocca 161-168). Magliocca’s book is a thoughtful and well-done book on how Americans' views of the Bill of Rights changed over time.