Alt-constitution: rewriting the constitution without Washington's permission.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community - Book review

America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community, by Robert L. Tsai, Harvard University Press, 332 pages, $33

What do white supremacists and black nationalists, abolitionists and Confederates, utopian socialists and crafty frontiersmen, embattled Indian tribes and mandarin globalist intellectuals have in common? They all wrote new constitutions, hoping to supersede the document adopted in Philadelphia in 1787. In America's Forgotten Constitutions, Robert L. Tsai, a professor of law at American University, tells their tales.

Each of these projects had at its heart a colorful man or small group of men (yes, it's pretty much all men) who were spurred to found a polity for their people. It would be fair to describe their efforts as "defiant." Another apt word would be "futile." Over eight substantial case studies, Tsai shows how the rebels were marginalized, co-opted, or crushed.

Consider the little republic of "Indian Stream," which squeezed for itself a temporary autonomy in the interstices of border conflicts between the United States and Canada. Declaring independence in 1832, these frontiersmen--fewer than a thousand of them--lived in what was then a legal netherworld between Quebec and New Hampshire, insisting they were part of neither. After three years of playing their surrounding jurisdictions off one another, the Indian Streamers were crushed by the military might of New Hampshire. (The federal government declined to join in.) But the ideas that animated them survive in America today. The Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's recent attempts to defy the Bureau of Land Management's restrictions on his cattle grazing, for example, were rooted in one of the same ideas that inspired Indian Stream: a belief, as Tsai puts it, that "true political authority springs from productive use of the land."

The book's other subjects include a socialist communal cult called "Icaria" in mid-i9th-century Illinois, the college professors and administrators who designed a one-world nation to quash the threat of nuclear war after World War II, and some Internet racists who encouraged their fellow white supremacists (but no vulgar skinhead ruffians, please) to swamp the Pacific Northwest and eventually break away from the United States. Tsai's subjects span a multiverse of fascinatingly conflicted and failed strivers. Aside from the abolitionist John Brown and his spiritual enemies, the Confederate founders, most of them have remained...