Omissions compromise constitution study

BOOK REVIEW By JANE CLARK CASEY

Elmer Gertz and Joseph P. Pisciotte. Charter for a New Age: An Inside View of the Sixth Illinois Constitutional Convention. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Pp. 378 $15. (This is the tenth and final volume of the series. Studies in Illinois Constitution-Making, published for the Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois.)

THE SIXTH Illinois Constitutional Convention is almost certainly the most thoroughly dissected such convention in the history of the United States. For those who would write a successful charter of their own, it is all there: the extensive preparatory writings, the flood of news coverage throughout the proceedings, the books and articles generated in the convention's wake. Central to the post-convention writing has been the series, Studies in Illinois Constitution-Making, published by the University of Illinois Press for the Institute of Government and Public Affairs. With the publication of the last volume in this series, Charter for a New Age: An Inside View of the Sixth Illinois Constitutional Convention by Elmer Gertz and Joe Pisciotte, we have probably come to the end of writings focusing primarily on the convention itself, as opposed to the constitution produced by that convention.

One question that immediately comes to mind is whether the book is not simply too late for what it is. Ten years having passed, we may be more curious about the effect of the Constitution than about how it was written. What difficulties were encountered in its implementation? What litigation has resulted and how was it resolved? What political wars have been fought? Those questions are barely raised in Charter for a New Age. True, there is a need of a permanent record of the processes that produced the Constitution, but that record has been ably made in the earlier volumes in the series.

Those seriously interested in constitutional revision should be reading Janet Cornelius's Constitution-Making in Illinois, 1818-1970, a scholarly overview of the state's prior conventions, or JoAnne Watson's Electing a Constitution, a veritable handbook for those who would call a constitutional convention and see that its product is popularly accepted. Neither volume is colorful or engaging in its presentation of the people who drafted the various charters, but each makes a solid contribution to our understanding of what works in constitution-making. If it is the process of decisionmaking that interests the reader, there is Joyce Fishbane and Glenn Fisher's excellent Politics of the Purse, which studies the interplay of rational decisionmaking and the social choice process in the deliberations of the Revenue and Finance Committee. Roll Call by David Kenney, Jack Van Der Slik and Samuel Pernacciaro, a highly technical but revealing study of voting patterns at the convention, may tell constitutional researchers more about delegates than the delegates understood about themselves.

The authors of the latest book acknowledge they "have not hesitated to borrow extensively" from these volumes. In fact, chapter after chapter is little more than a synopsis of one of the earlier books. Hence the material on lobbying and on citizen input through public hearings around the state says little or nothing not said by Ian Burman in Lobbying at the Illinois Constitutional Convention. The Bill of Rights chapter is material from Gertz's earlier book, For the First Hours of Tomorrow. Virtually the entire chapter on suffrage and amendment is literally quoted from Alan Gratch and Virginia Ubik's Ballots for Change, and the material on composition of the education committee, while interesting, is borrowed almost verbatim from Jane Buresh's A Fundamental Goal. The judicial article and its evolution have, as the authors acknowledge, been well covered by Rubin G. Cohn in To Judge with Justice; the chapter on the judicial article adds nothing to what Cohn has said.

Charter for a New Age does explore two areas not covered in the earlier volumes of the series, and these bear mentioning. The chapter on the executive article, written with the assistance of committee member Ronald Smith, gives us an inside view of that committee unavailable elsewhere. The portrait drawn of committee chairman Joseph Tecson, an intriguing man given only slight exposure in the earlier volumes, is particularly valuable. Home rule and the construction of the home rule language are also discussed for the first time in the series, this time with the assistance of Ann Lousin, of the convention's research staff. Yet the question can fairly be raised whether this small amount of new material merited an additional volume.

Charter for a New Age could have been such a special book. As executive director to the convention, Pisciotte enjoyed that peculiarly intimate view of elected officials that only staff can get. I know he did, because I have heard him talk about the convention so many times, so many hours, and so openly. Gertz, who came to the convention as an established public figure in his own right, was in an ideal position to make insightful and objective judgments about the events and personalities pulled together in Springfield for that unique moment in history. What they have given us instead is a poorly organized collection of anecdotes that throws little new light on the real people or the real motives behind the final product of the convention.

February 1981/Illinois Issues/21

So much of the book is taken up with lists - lists of proposals, lists of changes, lists of names. Considerable space is devoted, for instance, to various lists of convention elite but the lists alone mean nothing. I wanted to know why these people rose to power, what led other delegates to follow them. I wanted to know whether the delegates responded to sharpness or to persistence, to austerity or to wit. It would have been worth reading one more book about the writing of the Constitution to learn those things.

Other times, there are lengthy passages describing a minor event, without any explanation of why that event should interest us. The dispute over signing of the document is typical. Several pages are devoted to that dispute, but all that emerges is that some delegates wanted to sign after the close of the convention and others didn't want to let them do so. If that's all there is to the story, it's hardly worth telling. Actually, the incident was just the surface reflection of deeper hostilities; in describing it, the authors could have said something about how this small charade reflected the deeper tensions at the convention.

Perhaps the book's greatest failure is in its treatment of convention president Samuel Witwer. Complex, reserved, driven, frequently controversial, Witwer was known to Gertz and Pisciotte as few knew him. They were in a unique position to tell his story; instead, they play apologist for him, a service he does not need. The 1970 Constitution is itself a living tribute to his mastery of political maneuvering and his statesmanlike devotion to improving Illinois government. That does not change the fact that he has inspired almost as much animosity as admiration. While admitting that a "cult of antipathy" toward Witwer developed early in the convention, the authors fail to recognize that, with some few exceptions, there was as much integrity in that antipathy as there was in Witwer's endeavors. What could have been an exciting and instructive study of the strengths and weaknesses of this man, of the pressures on him and the forces against him, is instead simply an anemic hymn. The authors might have taken a lesson from Cohn, whose To Judge with Justice presents such an even-handed view of issues on which he felt so strongly, and such careful elaboration of the deeply held beliefs on both sides. To acknowledge that people disagree, and that there are sound reasons for their disagreements, is not to take sides between them. Witwer is not a god, and those who opposed him were not necessarily motivated by petty selfishness, stupidity or personal ambition.

This blindness on the subject of Witwer leads to some telling slips. One of the most interesting is the failure to see the parallels between loyalty to Witwer and loyalty to any other political leader. Hence, the Chicago Democrats are implicitly or explicitly criticized repeatedly for supposedly following the dictates of loyalty rather than those of conscience, yet it is said of delegate Wayne Whalen, "One had to reckon with him at all times even if one were the president of the convention to whom a debt of gratitude might be due by reason of an unexpected high appointment. . . ."

There was indeed, and still is, a "cult of antipathy" for Witwer. To dismiss his critics as self-serving and narrow-minded, as this book does, is not only unfair to them but unfair to history. What is perhaps worse, it is a disservice to Witwer, for it suggests the writers are afraid his work cannot withstand criticism.

Jane Clark Casey, on leave from John Marshall Law School, is Cook County deputy state's attorney, civil division. She also edited two of the volumes in the series on Illinois Constitution-Making.

February 1981/Illinois Issues/22