The “Gettysburg Address” – a mere 272 words spoken by Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863 – was to become the “Gettysburg formula,” a rhetorical “sleight of hand” strengthening a document that created something no one believed could work: a democratic society born of revolution.
Such a profound transformation has not occurred to any of Mexico’s several constitutions – though Mexican scholars say the 1917 document, 100 years old on Sunday, February 5, needs help.
The march toward a democratic goal here is marked by the hard documentary steps this country’s constitutions have taken. Mexico’s first constitution, signed in Apatzigan, Michoacan in 1814 by rebel priest Jose Maria Morelos and his colleagues (most to be executed), served primarily to constitute a nation separate and independent from Spain.
The 1917 “Constitution of Queretaro” resembles in many ways the U.S. Constitution. This is because it mirrors the Republic’s earlier benchmark Constitution of February 5, 1857, which was in turn modeled on its ancestor of 1824. Both the framers of the U.S. Constitution and Mexico’s 1824 and 1857 Constitutions looked to French philosophers – Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu – but came to different practical conclusions.
The 1917 document, longer than the United States one, boldly enumerates the basic rights found in the Bill of Rights: freedom of speech, religion, petition and an array of legal rights. But the Mexican document goes further, guaranteeing the right to a good job (Article 123), decent housing and health care (Article 4), and much more. Unfortunately, to limited avail in the case of freedom of speech, petition, legal rights, good jobs, decent housing and health, freedom from government abuse, as many Mexicans will tell you today.
Yet several Mexican governments have tried to live up to many of these daring promises. The establishment apology made for some Mexican presidents’ indifference to, and discomfort with, the 1917 Constitution has been that Mexican society hasn’t been ready for democracy.
Because that society was in great part illiterate until recent years, it was deemed unprepared for the responsibilities of citizenship.
Unsurprisingly, most of those who use that argument have been ruling politicians. But a good many foreign academicians and journalists have chimed in. Today, some critics call the 1917 document too “complex and excessively detailed” for citizens of a country plagued by incompetent and corrupt rulers.
Lincoln, a benefactor of one of Mexico’s most revered presidents, Benito Juarez, considered the U.S. Constitution (though stiff with “recalcitrant” clusters of legal compromise) to be a binding American testament. For he believed it possessed in its declared principles the wisdom to guide the action of government, certainly of presidents. The Mexican Constitution, presidents lawyers and academicians have indicated, is to be considered a blueprint of aspirations. As a result, post-1917 jefes have eased their discomfort with the Constitution more than 650 times (about one change every two months). Meanwhile, the U.S. Constitution has had 27 changes in 220 years.
Lincoln, in three minutes at Gettysburg, reshaped the U.S. Constitution forever without mentioning Gettysburg, slavery, the Union, the South, emancipation – or change. America’s Magna Carta was changed from “within,” historian Gary Wills brilliantly notes, “from its letter to the spirit.”
Lincoln’s “plain speech” address performed (subliminally for many of his listeners) an intellectual revolution. He seeded a new founding for the nation by seeking to “cleanse” American history “tainted with official sins and inherited guilt” – slavery. His audience came with one kind of Constitution in its pocket, and left with an altogether different kind of social contract. It was one that corrected things in the great American achievement of 1789 that Civil War slaughter had unveiled as deficient.
This outraged and continues to outrage U.S. conservatives who, loathe to attack the first Republican president, one of the most revered figures of American history, often pretend the Gettysburg speech has no intellectual weight. It is a mere “sequence of ideas ... commonplace to the point of banality.” They condemned all U.S. citizens since 1863 as dunces. The rest of the time such folk – Republicans such as Robert Bork – have railed against Lincoln for undertaking a presumptuous “new founding” of the nation. As the late conservative (and founding editor of William Buckley’s National Review) Willmoore Kendall correctly said, “Abraham Lincoln and ... the authors of the post-civil-war amendments, attempted a new act of founding, involving ... a startling new interpretation of that principle of the founders which declares that ‘all men are created equal.’”
But both conservatives and liberals are wrong when they argue that Lincoln created the plain “Gettysburg style” simply by using shorter, simpler sentences. The final sentence of the address is 82 words, nearly one-third of the entire text. It was Lincoln’s cadence and choice of words that created a new literary style. He foreshadowed the shift to vernacular rhythms that Mark Twain would fulfill 20 years later. Hemingway would correctly say that all modern American novels are offspring of “Huckleberry Finn.” Noting that, Gary Wills writes, “It is no great exaggeration to say that all modern political prose descends from the Gettysburg Address.”
Mexican intellectuals as diverse as Nobel laureate Octavio Paz and journalist Sergio Sarmiento have mentioned that, despite the crumbling of the long rule of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), basic contradictions of the Mexican state remain. Despite the impedimenta and declarations of modernism, the Mexican state has yet to modernize itself, they’ve said. It has yet to shed enough traditional layers of its rainbow of corruption, or its disdain for its roots, to allow competence and a humane sense of its citizens to place the central promise of 1917 within reach of ordinary Mexicans.