Wilder Publications, a small publishing company based in Redford Va., is offering on Amazon.com a rather unusual compendium of The Constitution, The Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation. The Wilder edition of our country’s founding documents comes complete with a prefatory warning label:
This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.”
The outcry– not only from the right–has been predictably vociferous. There’s even a Facebook page urging a boycott of Wilder Publications and also offering interesting information regarding its owner, Warren Lapine, including some of his favorite Facebook pages. Other displays of outrage against Wilder are numerous and easily located via a simple Google search.
With all due respect to them, however, Lapine’s detractors have it all wrong. Rather than revilement, we owe Wilder Publications a huge debt of gratitude for this useful and long overdue caveat lector. Wilder Publications has just invented a new genre of literature: safe history.
Short of censoring The Constitution and the other offending documents outright–book banning is still lamentably illegal at this time in the United States–adding its disclaimer was the best precaution Wilder could take. In doing so, it has given us a new invention: the literary condom, a verbal prophylactic against the dangerously seminal ideas inherent in this sexist, bigoted “product of its time.”
In proof of which, consider some of the Constitution’s perilous language. Article 1, section 8 grants the Congress the power:
To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; …
To establish Post Offices and post Roads;
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;
Look hard at that list of racially, sexually, ethnically, and interpersonally obsolete concepts: controlling the citizenship process; providing for orderly liquidation of failed companies; instituting a regulated currency; running a mail delivery service and providing a national transportation system; ensuring the proper compensation and protection of intellectual property; instituting a legal system to protect all of the above. How out-of-step with the enlightened ideas of our modern era. Reader, be warned!
Without Wilder, we might actually have believed some of the drivel put forth in this 4,500-word Democracy for Dummies Guidebook. After all, great writing must never be a product of its time. Although efforts to ban Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer continue to this day in some circles, the enlightened 21st-century reader views Clemens’ stories simply as quaint “products of their time,” the rude ramblings of a racist, misogynist river cruiser — otherwise known as one of the greatest of all American authors.
Granted, the Constitution, without mentioning slavery outright, does refer to it in Article 1, Section 9:
The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.
It would take many decades for the issue of emancipation to rise to the level of passion whereby Americans would be ready to kill their fellow countrymen by the thousands, either to preserve or abolish slavery. The Constitution, in modern parlance, merely “kicked the can down the road,” much as today’s legislators have done for decades with the unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Medicaid and the Ponzi Scheme known as Social Security.
To condemn the Constitution (or admonish modern-day readers of it) for its procrastination on the difficult issue of slavery is not only disingenuous but intellectually dishonest. Milton wrote in his 1644 eloquent treatise against censorship in England, Areopagitica:
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.
O, poor unenlightened product of 17th-century darkness! We know better today than to mention God in political argument.
Although Ray Bradbury’s dystopic world of Fahrenheit 451 book banning has not yet become reality, that day may arrive sooner rather than later in view of the Obama administration’s rush to control not only physical property such as banks, auto manufacturers, hospitals, drug companies and the like, but also intellectual real estate such as thoughts and ideas.
Until we are fully delivered from the peril of books, our best safeguard against the danger of our own minds–and the backward thinking of our powder-wigged patriot founders– is Wilder Publications and its little Trojan of truth.