Good Essay About Hypocrisy In The US Constitution

Langston Hughes in his poem “Let America Be America Again” paints a picture of an America that is a deprivation of the ideal people have about it. He mentions that America has never lived up to this ideal, but that he is dedicated to it becoming that ideal. He writes, “America never was America to me, /And yet I swear this oath— /America will be!” The poem is as much a wish of how Hughes wants America to be but sees that it is currently not. He writes, “Let it be that great strong land of love /Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme.” There is an implication here, if he is asking it to be that way, that it is currently not, which seems to indicate that it is a land wehre kings connive and tyrants scheme. In short, Hughes’ poem is about the unfulfilled dreams of many immigrants, who left oppression to come to a land to build a “homeland of the free” but found themselves economically disenfranchised or persecuted because of their ethnicity prompting Hughes parenthetical remark that “(America never was America to me.)” Hughes, though he is writing poetry, is drawing from actual events and circumstances that he saw in America, the basic hypocrisy of how he interpreted what the constitution should grant citizens. An investigation into his accusations shows that there is at the basic level of the constitution and how America as an entity collectively acts a healthy amount of hypocrisy.
In order to make judgments of the hypocrisy in how government uses the constitution, it is important to get to understand what works and political ideas went into the constitution and what their framers intended. Although the US Constitution was a founding document, was also the product of pre-existing schools of thoughts and philosophies stemming from a change in framework for understanding the rights of individual citizens and the role of government within a society. Jefferson was clear in a letter to R. H. Lee that much of the declaration of independence was rooted in the natural rights philosophy of John Locke (Sorenson, 243).
The Constitution can be broken into three constitutions. (Franklin, 405). Mitchel Franklin traces back, influence or Roman law within the US constitution by way of the French Enlightenment. Franklin’s tracing of ideas is by no means as clear as the link between the US constitution and philosophies that resulted from the French Enlightenment. Franklin considers the contemplation valuable in how history is to be viewed:
If it can be established that certain constitutional formulations have a Romanist meaning or significance, the American constitution in the future may be more clearly and more firmly understood as consecrating the advanced legal thought of eighteenth-century bourgeois history. (Fralklin, 2003).
A dominant theory is that American constitutional takes are begotten from English legal history. This theory comes with a set of consequences. One being that the American revolt which became The American revolution, was founded on preserving a system and inheriting it than it is about doing away with a system and creating a better one (Franklin, 2003).
The US Constitution as it exists today is the result of three distinct stages of development. The first prepared at Philadelphia in 1787, the second 1789, and the Bill of Rights. There are seven guiding principles that the constitution can be broken into checks and balances, separation of powers, republicanism, federalism, limited government, individual rights, and popular sovereignty. Understanding that aspects of Roman law exist within the ideas that sprang from the French Enlightenment, these principles all can be associated with similar thinking in the French Enlightenment thoughts that the writers of the constitution would have been familiar with. Popular sovereignty has the clearest parallels to the lines of thought developed during the French Enlightenment. Popular sovereignty places power of the state on the people. It allows individual citizens to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Part of this can be traced to the thinking of John Locke, the English philosopher who first coined the term “natural rights” of life, Liberty and Property. (Powel, 1996). In his “Second Treatise of Civil Government: An essay concerning The True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government, Locke writes:
Lock makes his argument by appealing to logic. That men, while they can be oppressed, cannot have their autonomy completely suppressed. This founding principle is at the heart of the US constitution. Few would argue against the virtue of these guiding principles, but when explored how well they translate into real world action, a stark contrast appears between the US government’s actions towards people of other sovereignties. Constance McGovern writes about the disenfranchisement of people of other nation at the hand of the US government in his review of Matthew Frye Jacobson’s book Barbarian Virtues. The list of abuses and not applying the same life, liberties and the pursuit of happiness seem systematic, especially in the years Barbarian Virtues covers, 1876-1917. Based on American intervention in other countries the “pursuit of happiness” as idealized in the constitution was actualized in the pursuit of profit. In practice the constitution is only applied to people of other countries as a secondary concern, the primary concern is often exploitation in the name of profit. That Chinese people who were brought to America for industry (to build railroads) and then after the railroad’s completion were bared from the privileges of American citizenship under a clause of the 1790 Naturalization Act is one example of a history of hypocrisy in the face of the US Constitutions interpretation and the Locke natural rights philosophies fueling it. Clearly the president at the time did not believe the US constitutions natural rights applied to the Philippines when they waged a war there where 222,000 Filipinos died as “Americans seized control” and “characterized the native peoples as savage and granted none of the privileges of democracy.
Coursing through the history of the United States is the reality that, profit, not the defense of individual rights is preeminent. The founding documents, The US Constitution and The Declaration of Independence, contain a contradiction. One affirms inalienable rights, while the other is written to protect the interests of self-determination, even if it comes at the expense of equality and other’s rights. This led Leonard R. Sorenson to ask “how can U.S. citizens, including the sovereign many, be encouraged to achieve and be judged by standards of excellence, most of which, according to the classical view, are only actualizable by those potentially superior by nature?” (Sorenson, 226). This basica contradiction, is what lead Hughes to lament that “America was never America to me.”
Works CitedFranklin, Mitchell. "Concerning the INfluence of Roman Law on the FOrmulation of the Constitution of the United States." Nature Society and Thought 16.4 (2003): 405-438. Print.
Hughes, Langston. "Let America Be America Again." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 2 Dec. 2013. <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15609>.
Locke, John, and Thomas Preston Peardon. The second treatise of government. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1952. Print
"Strauss, Anastaplo, and Crosskey on "One Hard Nut to Crack": The US Constitution." Perspectives on Political Science 36 (2007): 222-227. Print.