The Fourteenth
Schardt, Arlie
The Fourteenth the amendment that refused to die, by Howard N. Meyer. Chilton. 250 pp. $7.95. reviewed by Arlie Schardt "It seems all I've done since college is unlearn what I was taught in...
...Mr...
...How many good minds have thus been turned away from actively working to make a reality of the American goal of equal rights for all citizens is something we can never know...
...We learn again how little happens that is really new...
...Or President Andrew Johnson's betrayal of the very reason for the Civil War, as he bartered away Federally guaranteed protection of individual liberty for the principle of states' rights...
...reviewed by Arlie Schardt "It seems all I've done since college is unlearn what I was taught in school...
...The need to know about past efforts to stamp out freedom becomes more than abstract as we see today how willingly men in the White House itself will plot to take that freedom away...
...Through the lives of others, we appreciate how true it is that no citizen is free unless all citizens are free...
...Schardt is director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union...
...His choices are vivid...
...We do know that minds deprived of such knowledge are easy marks for demagogues...
...And I feel certain that many more people would have applied their minds to the struggle for freedom if their education were typified by books like The Amendment That Refused to Die, by Howard N. Meyer, a white lawyer who has specialized in the study of the Civil War era and the experiences of blacks in the Union Army...
...For here, from a man who is unashamedly a committed civil libertarian, is a frank blend of the good and the bad, the heroic and the disgusting, that created the America we live in today...
...It should be a textbook for every high school senior, and a readable gift for all the rest of us...
...The problem with an educational system that teaches only the inspirational, red-white-and-blue aspects of American history, while glossing over the sorrier episodes, is that the best of our young people soon discover the truth for themselves anyway—so the only result of their being protected from historical truth is that they feel cheated and cynical about their education, and often about the stated ideals of our democracy as well...
...Those words, from a friend in her early twenties, were spoken after she had read an article relating some of the ways our Federal Government assisted big business in exploiting working people during the last century...
...Through a wisely selected series of sketches of often obscure people and events, Meyer literally brings alive the story of the Fourteenth Amendment— the equal protection guarantee—which is also the story of freedom as we know it in contemporary America...
...The Amendment That Refused to Die is free of dry legalisms or technical jargon...
...Meyer's account is truly a story of our past that enlightens our present...
...Nor is there anything abstract about other headline issues of today—school desegregation, the equal rights amendment, the death penalty, to name a few—whose resolution depends on the Fourteenth Amendment...
...Our freedom would be stronger today if Americans were armed with the knowledge in books like this one...
...The periods of mob rule and lawlessness that ensued whenever our Government or the Supreme Court chose to ignore this truth, enabling one group to oppress another, are ample warning of the pain that befalls us all when we fail to hold our institutions—and our leaders—to the strictest accountability...
...Who can forget the drama of a dying Thaddeus Stevens being carried to and from the House floor to lead the fight for passage of the Amendment...
...The highest compliment I can pay Howard Meyer is that he does not write like a lawyer...
Vol. 38 • June 1974 • No. 6
