4.7 America Was Founded On Two Rivers part 7

The Bill of Rights submitted to the states for ratification had twelve amendments. The amendment preventing any increase in compensation from taking effect until after the next House election was rejected. It became the 27th Amendment in 1992.

The other unratified amendment was a provision to establish a “ratio of representation”. The Constitution granted each state a minimum of one representative and limited representatives to no more than one representative per 30,000 people. Slave states benefited from that rule because their representation increased by 3/5ths of the number of slaves they held.¹ That ratio ensured that representation would match the growth in population, but it threatened to increased the number of representatives to numbers thought unmanageable. it was also unclear how the House would reapportion itself. 

Eventually population growth, which centered in urban areas, politically disadvantaged small, predominantly rural states. In 1920 the census revealed that the U.S. had become a majority urban nation. The English descendants, who self identified as “real Americans” believed the Irish, French. Italian, and Eastern European immigrants threatened “American” values. To minimize danger of urban political power corrupting America, congress passed restriction on immigration and passed the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. The Act capped the House at 435 members.

The Act preserved an American identity by giving disproportionate political power to people whose culture and values depended on isolation from new or different beliefs and knowledge. That was Burke’s conservative preservation of tradition despite a changed world. It was inherently defensive: new information became threatening. Rural America became detached from the changes in the surrounding world.

While the Act changed the composition of the House, its most enduring effect was on the Electoral College.

Urban populations grew as farms and farm communities declined. The requirement of 2 senators and a minimum of one representative gave the former Confederate and western prairie states disproportionate political power. A popular meme compares the population of LA county California (10,039,107) to the combined populations of Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa (10,170,801). They have 17 and 16 Representatives respectively. At First glance that seems proportional. In the electoral college, however, LA county has 17 Representative and 2/52ths of the state’s Senators. The seven consolidated states have Sixteen Representatives and 14 Senators for 30 electoral college votes.

The rejected amendment would have made representative apportionment using a set formula: one Representative for every X people in the state. The Hamilton Papers argued for representatives close to the people both in wealth and a limited numbers of constituents per district (1 per 30,000 increasing as number of people per district grew). The key feature was the set ratio used for every state.²

Responding to the growth in urban populations the government capped the House at 435 members and adopted an inconsistent proportional formula for apportionment. The easiest place to see this inconsistency is in states with two representatives. Idaho, the largest two-representative state has 1,014,866 people per district. Rhode Island, the smallest two-representative state has 557,260 people per district. Using the Rhode Island ratio to determine Representatives, California should have 70.6 Representatives not its current 52. LA county should have 18.

It is clear that opposition to immigrants and cities motivated the Representative cap. Violating the Constitution, congress did not reapportion itself following the 1920 census. It struggled to find a response until 1929, then used the 1910 majority rural data make the apportionment.

The specific ratios vary with each state in the meme block, but the rural over representation caused by the failure to ratify the proposed amendment has given small population states a continuing disproportionate power over urban populations. The legacy of evil cities that didn’t share rural “real American” values remains central to the ongoing culture war. That war, though, is better understood as a fight to preserve the inherent inequality of the Constitution.

What Is The Legacy Of The Constitution And The Fight Over The Bill Of Rights?

The Constitution did not establish individual freedom. “That all men are created equal, they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” was a campaign slogan. Those words, let alone ideas do not appear in the Constitution. With States free to establish separate voting requirements the Constitution did not even establish individual freedom for all white men. These statements seem so at odds with the high school American myth spread by the Heritage Foundation and similar reactionary political groups that they are difficult for people to contemplate.

The myth forces us to view history through a narrow slit: brave Christians fighting heathen savages. Contrary to the American freedom myth, the Constitution ceded ownership of all non-persons to the government. The government was free  treat non-persons as it chose. It has been used tojustify white slave owners bringing better lives to blacks who were too undeveloped to govern themselves. Women in wealthy households were considered to feeble to govern themselves and farm wives to ignorant to own property.

That is the benign version of Constitutional ownership. Rather than protect women’s freedom over their bodies, the Constitution gave the government the authority to forcibly sterilize women, overwhelmingly focused on black and indigenous women. It gave state governments the right to tell white, property holding men whom they could not marry. Yet in practice both as slave owners and under Jim Crow practices, white men could rape black women with impunity.

The legal world the Constitution created divided people between a group that mattered and classes of disempowered, dehumanized people: objects to serve the purpose and pleasure of the “natural Aristocracy”.

And the way to understand this principle is James Henry Hammond’s Mudsill Theory. Definition: the mudsill is the lowest timber, or sill, in the foundation of a structure.

Mudsill theory builds on ideas of Aristocratic rights and privilege going back to ideas borrowed from Rome and Edmund Burke. It says aloud the authoritarian principles the Constitution silently enshrined.

¹ While the Civil War officially nullified the 3/5ths compromise, the use of poll taxes, reading tests, and Jim Crow laws effectively disenfranchised black voting in comparable numbers.

² The New Zealand model uses the population of the smallest state as the base. Each time a state population grows by that number it gets an additional representative.