PEACEFUL REVOLUTION

An insightful scholarly study of how ideas and images of constitutional government permeate popular culture.

When before have Ida Tarbell, Booth Tarkington, King Vidor, Maxwell Anderson, George S. Kaufman, and George Gershwin appeared in a book of constitutional history? Probably never. But Bloomfield (American Lawyers in a Changing Society, not reviewed) makes a compelling case that they have a place there, at least if one seeks to understand the role of the Constitution in the American imagination. A constitutional democracy, Bloomfield assumes, depends for its stability not only on constitutional rules but also on the stories that are told about constitutional values. What’s striking, over a span of a mere 30 years or so, is how what Bloomfield terms “constitutional idealism” suffused and transformed itself in all versions of American popular culture—magazines of opinion, to be sure, but also novels (many now forgotten), films, dramas, and musicals. Even modern vernacular classics like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards (usually taken to be nothing but a utopian romance) gain fresh readings under Bloomfield’s focused lens for what they betray of constitutional thought. One comes away with a new understanding of the varying “constitutional faiths” of many Americans. But how representative these faiths were and how specifically they might have affected the distribution of political power is not clear. Nor, by looking only at a segment of the 20th century, does Bloomfield help us understand how the popular culture of 20th-century constitutionalism took form before 1900. Nevertheless, he convincingly shows how the acceptance of FDR’s New Deal depended upon greatly broadened and altered ideas about the nation’s fundamental governing principles.

A significant contribution to the history of 20th-century popular and political culture.