It is sometimes said that democracy wants education. Also: strong foundations make for good buildings. And: the more larnin’, the more votin’. So, the other night, when three New Yorkers showed up at the Old Stone House, a re-created 1699 farmhouse turned community center in Brooklyn, to take part in a social art project in which they would each write out a copy of the Constitution—or as much of the Constitution as they could in two hours—nothing less than the fate of the nation seemed to be at stake. One participant, upon sitting at one of the four tables in the house’s great room and eying the Uniball pen and xeroxed Constitution before her, cleared her throat with a vehemence that seemed to augur spitting.
Morgan O’Hara, an eighty-four-year-old conceptual artist who was raised in Japan, started handwriting documents that are meant to protect human rights—a practice she calls “activism for introverts”—in 2017. Appalled by the level of discourse in the 2016 Presidential election, she decided that copying out the Constitution in a public place would provide consolation by deepening her understanding of the document. She saw no need to talk about the Constitution, though. “There have been so many experiences in my life where I have a lot to say but the extroverts always win,” she said the other day, over the phone from Venice, where she lives now. So O’Hara took herself to the New York Public Library’s majestic Rose Reading Room with pen and paper and got monkish.
“I told one of my studio neighbors about it, and she asked, ‘Can I put it on Facebook? People want to share it with their friends.’ It spread that way.” Since that initial foray, more than two thousand people across the world—from Taipei to Toronto to Berlin—have hand-copied their own relevant rights-bearing documents, in a hundred and forty-seven public writing sessions. Participating institutions have included Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale, Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the central library in Macau, and a women’s correctional facility in New Hampshire.
At the Old Stone House, the three people who showed up to join the venue’s director of education, Maggie Weber, were all female Brooklynites: a political-science student, an attorney turned novelist, and a middle-school teacher. The U.S. Constitution is famously short—4,543 words, or 7,591 if you include all twenty-seven amendments—but don’t tell that to someone tasked with writing it down, which can take twelve hours. (The Old Stone House will host sessions on the first Monday of each month for the rest of the year.) The four women, studiously bent over their work, looked by turns irritated, amused, and exhausted. One of those present thought, Why does the phrase “foreign emoluments” always make me think of Bain de Soleil?
Fifteen minutes before the end of the session, the women started talking politics. “Right now, we have a Department of Justice that’s answering to the executive branch,” the attorney-novelist said. “But that’s not how it was set up.” They discussed Mitch McConnell’s legacy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s reluctance to retire. The poli-sci student confessed, “I was secretive about coming to this. I thought, Am I crazy to do this?”
The attorney-novelist said, “Section 2, paragraph 3, brought me up short.” She read aloud the passage about how the apportionment of “Representatives and direct Taxes” would exclude “Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” The middle-school teacher commented on the irony that one of the Constitution’s “shortest articles, the one about the judicial branch, is also the least understood one, but it’ll be the most important one for getting us out of our current mess.”
O’Hara, who has written out the Constitution in full three times, said, in a phone call, “It’s a very calming experience. And when you’re calm you make better decisions.” She went on, “What really surprised me was the structure—that the executive is in between the judiciary and the legislative. That was a big relief when I found that out. And it shocked me how long it took for women to get the vote, and how long for slaves to be considered people.”
At the Old Stone House, the mood was a mixture of satisfaction and unease. The attorney-novelist said, “Maybe we should do this with Congress.” The others laughed.
Tariffs were in the news. Someone mentioned Article I, Section 10, which details duties and imports being “subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.” But these days, it was observed, even “controul” is out of control. ♦
