An Empire of Reason

Please enjoy this famous hour-long movie produced by Icarus Films and shown on PBS in 1988. From the website of Icarus Films:

What would it have been like if television had covered the ratification process of the U.S. Constitution?

Such is the premise of AN EMPIRE OF REASON, an imaginative look back at that process which ultimately gave birth of the United States of America.

Walter Cronkite appears as the anchorperson of CTN (Contintental Television Network) nightly news. In the TV news style of the late twentieth century, he reports the vociferous battle between the Federalists and anti-Federalists – to ratify the Constitution and become the United States, or to not ratify and remain affiliated, but autonomous states.

The debate rages on. Alexander Hamilton, one of the authors of the Constitution, and anti-Federalist Melancton Smith duke it out on William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line. Heated arguments on the necessity of a Bill of Rights take place on the MacNeil-Lehrer Report and The Donohue Show.

Interspersed with the larger political and constitutional debates are lively local news items, such as New York Mayor Ed Koch’s response to citizen demands for a trash collection alternative to the garbage-eating pigs roaming the city’s streets.

Hovde explains that they chose this contemporary format because “The way history is presented is cut-and-dried. It has nothing to do with us. It’s people in period costume.” AN EMPIRE OF REASON seeks to elucidate the issues so vital to that time – the benefits of a unified nation vs. the fear of a big, distant government; the pros and cons of a single currency, federal income tax, and a Bill of Rights – in such a way as to reveal the continued presence of these issues in contemporary American political discourse. What is at stake is nothing less than the still ongoing debate over the meaning of the word “democracy.”

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The featured image is “Washington at Constitutional Convention of 1787, signing of U.S. Constitution” (1856), by Junius Brutus Stearns, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.