Constitutional Convention (United States)

The work of framing the new nation's constitution proceeded with fifty-five persons and only two were not employers! ~ George L. Jackson

The Constitutional Convention took place from May 25 to September 17, 1787, in the old Pennsylvania State House.

Quotes

• On May 14, 1787, the Constitutional Convention with George Washington presiding officer, the work of framing the new nation's constitution proceeded with fifty-five persons and only two were not employers!
  • George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1971)

• The preponderant weight of economic power in the Constitutional Convention, while conceding the outward forms of political democracy, went on at once to curb the exercise of the very power it had just granted; it crippled the force of democratic power at the source by parceling up this power by a marvelously dexterous system of barriers to its expression. Thus political equality under the ballot was granted on the unstated but factually double-locked assumption that the people must refrain from seeking the extension of that equality to the economic sphere. In short, the attempted harmonious marriage of democracy to capitalism doomed genuinely popular control from the start.
  • Robert Staughton Lynd, Foreword to Business as a System of Power (1943), p. vii

See also

• United States Constitution