A machine that would go of itself, the constitution in American culture.

• Author: Cutler, Lloyd N.

A Machine that Would Go Of Itself, The Constitution in American Culture.

Michael Kammen, Alfred A. Knopf,$29.95.

In this book, a must-read for the bicentennialyear, Pulitzer Prize winner Martin Kammen sets himself a challenging task. He examines "the cultural impact of the United States Constitution.' He calls this a "study in popular constitutionalism' --of the "perceptions and misperceptions, uses and abuses, knowledge and ignorance of ordinary Americans.'

Kammen reaches somewhat farther than hisgrasp. His method is less analytical than quotational. He makes an exhaustive, sometimes exhausting, compilation of what various politicians, lawyers, judges, historians, and journalists have said and written about the Constitution. But his sources can hardly be regarded as "ordinary Americans.' (He does provide an interesting analysis of how immigrants applying for citizenship answered questionnaires about the American system of government). Given Kammen's method, one can excuse the paucity of remarks by average Americans; until the electronic age, there were few available records to work from.

Kammen's book should help ease some of theconcern in liberal circles that the current conservative attacks led by Attorney General Edwin Meese on the finality of the Supreme Court's interpretations of the Constitution are "unprecedented.' Though Kammen himself is also worried that these attacks are politicizing the Court, his own very interesting historical account shows that incumbent administrations have been challenging the authority and rulings of the Court since the days of Thomas Jefferson. Despite those challenges, reverence for the Constitution and the Court have grown.

This becomes clear when we compare theelaborate plans for celebrating the Constitution's upcoming 200th anniversary with what Kammen tells us about how the charter's earlier milestones were marked. The 50th anniversary in 1837 went largely unnoticed. The great battles over states' rights were still being waged, and the primacy of the national government remained at issue until it was established by force on the battlefields of the Civil War. Kammen includes this perceptive comment by The Nation's E.L. Godkin, who was one of the few to recognize what the Civil War and the constitutional amendments adopted during the Reconstruction era had accomplished: . . . the Constitution may fairly be considered as having existed in what may be called a provisional or experimental stage down to 1861. . . . [The Radical Republicans] resolved that they would cure [the Constitution's] defects at whatever cost, and put it into an undeniably permanent shape, and did so amid difficulties compared to which those of the Convention of 1787 were a mere trifle. They took hold resolutely of all the seriously obscure or ambiguous passages in the instrument, and of all compromises which had proved difficult or incapable of execution, and eliminated them.

Godkin's appreciation was a minority view.Kammen tells us that in the nation's capital in 1882, the "Constitution of the United States was kept folded up in a little tin box in the lower part of a closet, while the Declaration of Independence, mounted with all elegance, was exposed to...