Fifty-nine percent of Americans cannot identify the Bill of Rights. This is something that Penn history Professor Richard R. Beeman, an acknowledged authority on the American Constitution, plans to change. "The Constitution is our nation's civil religion. It is the one thing, absent a national religion or a monarch, that helps define us as a nation," he says.
Beeman, 55, has just been named first senior visiting fellow of the National Constitution Center, to be built on Independence Mall. His job will be to help make the museum literally come alive with interactive exhibits that will allow today's citizens to participate in the robust debate of the waistcoated Founding Fathers through re-enactments and video-in-the-round. "I have a natural interest in seeing that the history of the founding of the country is told in an accurate and interesting fashion," says Beeman.
"It will be a museum unlike any museum anywhere in the world," promises Beeman of the privately funded $123 million facility, which will begin rising on the north side of Arch Street Sept. 17, Constitution Day, 2000. "It will be a museum of ideas, of ideas of American citizenship."
Beeman, who has taught at Penn for 29 years, is well known to students for his charismatic classroom style, his ability to entrance students with his evocation of the past, and his skill at relating historical events to the modern world. Dressed in Puritan garb, he annually gives a highly charged sermon as 18th century preacher Jonathan Edwards.
Outside of the class, the genial, bespectacled professor, often accompanied by his pet Bernese mountain dog, Chief Justice John Marshmallow, welcomes discussions with students about his passion, history, which he pursued as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley. He earned a master's in history at the College of William and Mary and his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1968. He arrived at Penn later that year.
But even though the Constitution Center will be a priority, he will not give up teaching. He still is scheduled to teach the History of the United States to 1865, a course very similar to the one he took his sophomore year at Berkeley which inspired him to desert a business major for history. "History is a lot more intellectually stimulating and exciting," he says. He will also teach a freshman seminar, American Democratic Traditions.
As the senior fellow at the Constitution Center, his classroom and student population will expand exponentially. Once the center is in operation, an estimated 1 million visitors are expected to attend annually, not only from the United States but from around the world.
The idea of the Constitution Center was broached seriously a decade ago during the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution in 1787, and was authorized by an act of Congress in 1988. Beeman followed the development of the idea from its beginning, and became seriously involved in discussions over its content in 1995. A year later, he was a key participant in a convocation of brainstorming scholars. People wanted to know, "Where's the beef?" Beeman said at the time.
Now, it's up to him to provide it.
Before Penn became involved, Beeman had already expressed his excitement about the museum to President Judith Rodin and to Provost Stanley Chodorow, and said that Penn should play a larger role. By fortunate coincidence, Penn's strategic plan committed " the University to an expansion of research and teaching programs concerning democratic and legal institutions in America and around the world," Rodin said at Mayor Edward G. Rendell's June 12 press conference to announce the plans for the center.
A partnership between the museum and Penn made perfect sense, Rodin said. In turn, Rendell said that Penn's involvement emphasizes Philadelphia's role as "the historical home of the Constitution [and] establishes Philadelphia as the home for contemporary constitutional discussions and ideas."
While Beeman has been named a fellow only for the 1997-1998 academic year, he said he expected his involvement to be an extended one. His job, he said, has four components:
He sees the latter task as an expansion of what he's been doing at Penn for nearly three decades.
"I've been able to reach out to several thousands of undergraduates through my teaching," he said. "I really did see the opportunity to reach millions of Americans through the Constitution Center and that was an opportunity I couldn't pass up."
More on Penn's Role in the National Constitution Center
Return to Compass Features for July 15, 1997