Sep. 17—Flanked on each side by a member of Daughters of the American Revolution, Logansport Mayor Chris Martin read a proclamation on Friday declaring Sept. 17 through Sept. 23 Constitution Week in Logansport.
“The Constitution is ultimately America’s rules of the land,” Martin said. “Without the Constitution, we don’t have the country where it needs to be. That’s the importance of the Constitution in our eyes and to the city of Logansport.”
Constitution Week was first observed by Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in 1955. DAR is a nonprofit organization for women who are descents of someone who fought in the Revolutionary War. The group has no political affiliation, and local DAR Registrar Jayne Small said the organization has three main goals: to educate, to express patriotism and to preserve historic artifacts and heritage.
“(Constitution Week) kind of fits into two things: patriotism and education. We need to educate our people in the United States about the importance of our Constitution,” Small said. “…If (the constitution) hadn’t happened in 1787, we would be different than we are now.”
To promote Constitution Week, DAR members place information in libraries, ask local officials to make proclamations, put signs in front of public buildings and hand out pocket U.S. Constitutions to high school students taking government classes.
In addition to asking Martin to make a proclamation, a press release from the local Olde Towne Chapter of DAR said members provided bookmarks with the Preamble to the Constitution to Cass County fifth graders and gave government students pocket Constitutions at Lewis Cass High School, Logansport High School, and Pioneer High School.
“It’s important that we do everything we can to help educate our young people so they can go vote,” Small said. “They need to know what the Constitution says that they can do.”
Small added that many people get confused about which rights are specifically enshrined in the Constitution. She used the Fifth Amendment as an example and said Americans have the right not to incriminate themselves, but there is no right specifically saying they do not have to speak in court about matters that are not self-incriminating.
“I would like for people to know what the guys who wrote the Constitution were trying to do,” she said. “Before the Constitution, they had what was called the Articles of Confederation. It didn’t have a national government, so they were trying to form a national government and still keep some things for the states.”
The Constitution is accepted as the framework of the United States by Americans today, but Small said that was not always the case. Some early Americans did not like the idea of a federal government and did not want to submit to nationwide rules.
“There were 55 men who came to Philadelphia in 1787 and spent about four months working on this in secret,” she said. “They knew if the word got out, they would be faced with opposition because not everyone wanted them to have a national government. They wanted to keep their own state government, but you can’t have 50 different ideas about what government is.”
Small encouraged everyone to read the Constitution and celebrate its history this week.
“We need to observe it more than one week out of the year,” she said. “We need to be patriotic all the time and try to improve our education.”
