In the press of Gunwalker stuff, I forgot to post this email the other day from Jon Roland of The Constitution Society. Jon was an early supporter of my work with The John Doe Times, where it is still archived after all these years. I have disagreed with Jon about some things over the years, but I never forgot the assistance he rendered the private investigation of the Oklahoma City Bombing. Reminded by my trip down memory lane in the previous post, I present it here with the sincere hope that those of you with a few extra bucks take a look at Jon's efforts and find them worthy.
Mike
III
Incorporating the Constitution Society on April 1, 1994, was not planned as a target date. It was just the first day I could get to the Secretary of State's Office to file the Articles of Incorporation after writing them and getting the signatures of the other incorporators. Later, a supporter quipped that it was an April Fool's joke on tyrants.
When the Constitution Society was founded, there was no other organization quite like it anywhere in the United States or the world. We were the first to take a pure, strict position on constitutional construction and demand compliance with that. There were other efforts that claimed to be "originalist", but with a great deal of disagreement among them on what that meant. Most such efforts mixed their constitutionalist claims with policy agendas that drove the constitutional positions and often distorted them. It was, therefore, not surprising that most people looked on our effort as just another policy-driven effort. But we were not. For us it was not about policy. It was about the Constitution as originally meant and understood, and only about that. In 1994 that was a very radical position to take, and many dismissed us as "fringe" or "extremist".
But we hung in there, and in September, 1995, launched our website at http://constitution.org. I proceeded to put as much constitutional content on the site as I could, and began to scan and render books that were not available online. That quickly became the Liberty Library of Constitutional Classics, the jewel of our collection of documents and links.
As time passed, and web search engines became available, the central role of our efforts and our website emerged. We immediately went to or near the top of the rankings and stayed there. Visitors grew each month and became a flood, until now they are growing at more than 40% per year. We are now at more than 150 million page views.
As we persisted, public awareness and attitudes changed. From being out of the mainstream, the mainstream began to form around us. From a lot of disagreement about how to construe the Constitution, a consensus among more honest scholars began to coalesce and do so in agreement with us. Most of those doing so don't give us the credit. They claim to have discovered their insights independently. That's okay with us. But we had prepared much of the soup from which they sipped.
Now the Constitution is popular. Where once most of the words on which people searched to find our site were words other than "constitution", now they are searching on that word more than any other. And it is people all over the world.
In February I began giving our website a new look and functionality. If you haven't visited it for a while you might want to do so and linger awhile.
But we are at a critical stage. We have been doing all this with almost no money. Mostly the labor of unpaid volunteers. To consolidate the gains we have made, we will need a lot more resources than we are currently getting. We need your help as we never have before. Please consider your grandchildren and their grandchildren and give generously.
-- Jon
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