Front Page - Search

COMMENTARY
The Constitution and the Class of '55
(Published October 17, 2005)

By CHARLES A. MILLER

I graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in upper northwest Washington in the spring of 1955. As my 50th reunion approaches I realize more than ever how untypical my class was. In it was the daughter of a senator from Mississippi and the son of the chief of the U.S. Forest Service. In it were Bud McFarlane, who became National Security Adviser to President Reagan, Diane Divers, who became a confidant of President Clinton, and Judith Perlman, who became Miss Manners for The Washington Post.

But in another way Wilson High was typical. It averted its institutional eyes from values of the United States Constitution.

Our mornings began with the class holding our hands over our hearts, gazing at the American flag, and reciting the pledge of allegiance. I don't know that any of us considered the flag an image that the Bible forbade us to worship. But the Supreme Court had held a decade earlier that no public school could require religious objectors to participate in the pledge ritual.

In our senior year we had to re-memorize the pledge with "under God" newly inserted by a Congress that was out after godless communism. The objection to the phrase was not that it was religious, which it obviously was, but that Congress was tampering with a pillar of patriotism. I was not alone in remaining silent for the new words.

Our mornings also began with the class murmuring the Lord's Prayer and a student reading from the Bible. The Lord's Prayer, although it was the language of Jesus, seemed nondenominational. But it was an exercise of rote memorization in a circumstance that made it meaningless. A few years after we graduated, the Supreme Court declared our prayerful mornings unconstitutional.

In one religious practice, Woodrow Wilson High School was unique among American high schools. Because the sainted Woodrow Wilson was buried in the National Cathedral not far from the school, that was the site of our baccalaureate ceremony. It was incorporated into an Episcopalian vespers service and the school choir walked down the nave in back of the cross. The baccalaureate has long been discontinued, but it would surely be unconstitutional today.

Almost as unchallenged as religion was race. At the end of our junior year, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. Unlike virtually all other segregated school systems, the D. C. Board of Education promptly abolished the "colored division" of the Washington public schools, and for our senior year Wilson was no longer officially "white." But in practice nothing had changed. Not a single Negro student was enrolled at Woodrow Wilson. With one out-of-sight exception we remained isolated from the great sea change in American civil rights.

The exception was Glen Echo, the popular amusement park in Montgomery County. The Woodrow Wilson Key Club, a boys service organization established by the Kiwanis, planned a Glen Echo Day, with the proceeds for Children's Hospital. If there had been any black students at Wilson, they would not have been allowed at Glen Echo. As the general manager said: "Colored children are not welcome. Glen Echo is patronized by whites only."

But could a club in a formally integrated school sponsor an event at an actually segregated facility? A few members of the Key Club thought not and proposed canceling Glen Echo Day. The idea seemed absurd to most members, and the motion was overwhelmingly defeated. In the early 1960s after dozens of protests, Glen Echo desegregated. In 1964 the Supreme Court upheld the law against racial discrimination at public accommodations. A few years later Glen Echo closed as an amusement park.

No constitutional value was at greater risk in Washington when I was in high school than freedom of speech. The reason was McCarthyism.

The parents and relatives of many Wilson students worked for the government. They and their children all understood that we lived at a time and place of widespread suspicion. Herblock threw futile if funny daggers in the Washington Post. Justice Douglas asserted that "Fear stalks the classroom." It certainly stalked the administration at Woodrow Wilson.

In my senior year, the Philosophical Society, a club devoted to high-sounding topics and high-minded thinkers, invited I. F. Stone, the fiercely independent journalist (and father of my classmate, Chris) to talk about Plato's theory of government. Perhaps he would follow Socrates and corrupt the minds of the young. But the principal of Woodrow Wilson took no chances. He denied Stone permission to speak.

So Stone spoke in a private home. He announced that rather than speaking on Plato, he would talk about free speech. He told us about Socrates and Tom Paine, and then he spoke on someone we knew of only vaguely, the English poet and essayist John Milton.

In his essay "Areopagitica" Milton had written one of the great civil liberties tracts in western history. But Stone did more than tell us about "Areopagitica." He brought with him an early copy of it, for he was more than a journalist. He was also a rare book collector.

Holding the essay up for all to see, Stone read aloud and we listened as the Voice of Free Speech came across the centuries. I cannot remember which passages, but I assume they included Milton's translation of Euripides: "This is true liberty: That whoever has good counsel for the state is free to make it known in public."

With a passion for free speech glittering through his glasses, Stone interpreted the U.S. Constitution through a seventeenth century text that looked back to ancient Greece. He then passed his precious book around and we held it in our hands. With ironic thanks to Wilson High, I graduated a confident believer in our constitutional values.

What about the class of 2005?

***

Miller, a retired professor of political science, lives in the Shenandoah Valley. He looks forward uneasily to his class reunion on Oct. 29.

Copyright 2005 The Common Denominator