“In 1787 I’m told, our founding fathers all sat down and wrote a list of principles that’s known the world around. ’
We the people, in order to form a more perfect Union…’”
Starting out as a brand-new country, the United States [and Schoolhouse Rock!] laid out what the people desired in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution.
Barry McNealy is well aware of these principles. As part of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, he’s visiting Eureka College on March 27 to deliver his lecture, Towards a More Perfect Union.
In his lecture, McNealy will explore the divisions which shaped the country’s past amid the pursuit of justice and quality.
“I like to recall and remind people of the definition of history and to me, and what I was taught was it’s three simple words, and that is ‘change over time,’” McNealy said in an interview on WGLT’s Sound Ideas.
“History, of course, people think of the past, but as human beings, we do a great deal of things that are rote to us. History enters in when we break a cycle, we create another pathway and things are markedly different from what they used to be.”
While the title of his talk, Towards a More Perfect Union, does refer to the Constitution, the historian McNealy notes the reference also belongs to President Abraham Lincoln—whose legacy plays an outsized role in Illinois.
"The Union is much older than the Constitution," Lincoln said in his 1861 inauguration address. "...in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution, was 'to form a more perfect Union.' But if destruction of the Union, by one, or by a part only, of the States, be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity."
The Civil War began about five weeks later.
Change over time
McNealy said the Party of Lincoln itself is an example of what has changed over time.
“…the early Republican Party, we consider people like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner…we have to remember that in their time, they were on the left,” he said. “When we consider the evolution of the Republican Party through the end of Reconstruction, through the depths of the Great Depression, but coming out on the other side with the Civil Rights Movement.”
After the Civil Rights Movement, the one-time Republican nominee for President, Sen. Barry Goldwater, and others saw the realignment of political parties seen today and a rightward, conservative shift in Republican politics.
Comparatively, the party was drastically different in the era of President Ronald Reagan, another of Illinois' native sons [Lincoln was, however, born in Kentucky] and a Eureka College alum.
Reagan considered himself a supporter of equal rights, but his record was mixed when it came to supporting policies that advanced civil rights. He opposed affirmative action and cut budgets for civil rights agencies. He hesitated to sign an extension of the Voting Rights Act, opposed the Equal Rights Amendment and supported tax exemptions for private schools practicing racial discrimination.
“Reagan is, like most human beings, complex,” McNealy said. “When I think of Reagan, I think of the end of the Cold War, and how wonderful that was. I think of the coming back from the sort of malaise of the Vietnam War era and inflation and those kinds of economic policies that he was able to further.
“But at the same time, I look at the conditions of minorities. ...You could look at the HIV/AIDS epidemic. …I think you use the term tone deaf.”
History’s pendulum
And again, in the era of Donald Trump, the Republican Party today is unrecognizable to Reagan’s era.
McNealy said the ideological colleagues across the aisle are not immune to change either. He said an important part of looking at the past is pinpointing when “the pendulum” swings.
“I think the inflection point while we’re talking about presidents, it would have to be the election of President Barack Obama—and with Obama’s election, the swing back began with the Tea Party,” he said.
The right-wing, fiscal conservative movement reacted to Obama’s election with winning control back in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“…and then the Tea Party is going to give way to this idea of rampant racism in terms of Obama and his administration that actually still lingers with us today," said McNealy.
McNealy said it contrasts with the dynamic of Speaker Tip O’Neill, the liberal opposition leader against Reagan, who was known to still socialize and compromise with the dominant president of the 1980s.
Now, compromise is rarer.
The swinging pendulum of history may or may not a reason why the U.S. has not elected a woman for president. McNealy said the country can be hesitant to dive headfirst into uncharted waters.
“When we think of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his incarceration in Birmingham that led him to pen the ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’” he said. “He was writing in response to eight clergymen…there was a political fight between the old form of government and the new…they were asking Dr. King to pump the brakes on the movement and to slow it down a little bit,” he said.
Dr. King responded by telling the clergymen the people of God had waited for their constitutional rights for more than 340 years.
So, McNealy said history will move forward as it pleases. But change being "uncomfortable" doesn't mean it's not necessary.
The Free Soil movement
The Civil War was fought nearly 200 years ago, but remnants of it are far from gone in today’s society. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, McNealy said history feels near in his home town.
“For example, even though Birmingham was founded in 1871, we still have an antebellum home here. And of course there are monuments to the Confederacy that existed for no other reason than the perpetuation of human-child slavery,” he said.
“So, yeah, there is a nearness to it that exists here.”
But McNealy said northern states have their own histories to wrestle with. Of the original 13 colonies, Massachusetts was the first to allow slavery by law.
For six years, some congressional representatives were elected in the Free Soil Party in the pre-Civil War era. It opposed the expansion of slavey as westward expansion gained territory for new states—like Illinois.
McNealy said people tend to focus on the word "free."
“...but they don’t focus on the idea that the Free Soil movement wasn’t an abolitionist idea. It was an idea that said we need slavery. We just don’t want it to be around us; we don’t want to have to compete with it,” he said.
McNealy said the South still heavily depended on slave labor for manufacturing and the production of cotton, for example. Still, ideas always persisted based on someone being superior to others.
“The northern areas begin to diversify economically and realize that cash crops weren’t going to be as financially beneficial in the North. And so the idea of slavery was push towards the South, and then with the 13th amendment and the eradication of slavery, then you have the idea of segregation—to replace that physical slavery with a mental slavery.
"And that’s going to come in the turn of the 20th century,” he said.
To form a more perfect Union
The Constitution took time make changes extending rights to women and minorities, but McNealy said the document is stronger than the people who wrote it.
“First of all, in a pure sense, I think that human beings are aspirational,” he said. “We have to have something to work towards.”
As the founding fathers intended, officials can change it to better fit the country and the time.
“Twenty-five of the 55 delegates who spent that summer writing the constitution, just about half of them, 25 out of 55, owned people,” he said. “Enslavement was not something that was foreign at all. They were doing it. They wrote this into a constitution, but it is so very important to remember that, even though 25 or 55 were slave owners, all 55 of them knew that enslavement was wrong.
“It’s how we explain the idea that the Constitution ratified in 1789, for about seven decades, it protected, it enshrined human enslavement.”
McNealy said Article 1 protected enslavement “for a generation," by prohibiting Congress from banning the importation of enslaved people until 1808.
“If I put a date, certain that something can come to an end, I’m not necessarily destroying that thing, but I’m making room for its demise," McNealy said.
"As we look at the history of our county, it is very complex and there are multiple truths that we have to be able to look at and examine at the same time if we’re supposed to actually understand the progress that we’ve made and the direction that that progress was made in.”
Towards a More Perfect Union takes place at 2 p.m. March 27 in the Becker Auditorium at Eureka College, 300 E. College Ave., Eureka. The lecture is free and open to the public.
