The genius and murkiness of the Constitution
Throughline - NPR
Heidi Schreck reflects on her teenage passion for the Constitution and how her adult understanding evolved through personal trauma and legal cases like Castle Rock v. Gonzales. She explores the document's ambiguity, focu
Key takeaways
- The Constitution emphasizes negative rights, not positive ones
Transcript preview
This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Through Line. I'm Rundav Del Fetach. Each week we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began 250 years ago. Today I want to tell you about a woman named Heidi, Heidi Schrecht. I am an actor, writer, performer, creator. When Heidi was a teenager in the 1980s, she did something, she did something. something not a lot of kids were doing. When I was 15 years old I would travel the country giving speeches about the United States Constitution for prize money. Heidi loved the Constitution. She believed it was the greatest political document ever written and she was damn good at talking about it. Back then she wore a blue power suit, had very large permed hair, a lot of makeup. I would travel to big cities like Denver, like Denver. Fresno. I would win a whole bunch of money, bring it back to put my little safety deposit box for later. I was actually able to pay for my entire college education this way. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. It was 30 years ago and it was a state school, but thank you. That's Heidi on a Broadway stage some years ago, performing her hit play, what the Constitution means to me. It's a show Heidi wrote about her experience participating in those debate clubs when she was a teenager. For most of the play, is on stage by herself. She goes back and forth between the current Heidi, a woman in her late 40s, and the 15-year-old version of herself. The set is a recreation of the American Legion Hall where one of those debates took place decades ago. She stands alone on stage. Behind her is a wall covered with the faces of hundreds of men, framed photographs of competition judges and war veterans. Our Constitution can be thought of as a boiling pot in which we are together in sizzling and steamy conflict to find out what it is we truly believe. That is why it's such a radical document. And it's from this so-called radical document, from those years spent deliberating over the Constitution, that things started to click and to change in Heidi's worldview. I would say the biggest thing that happened, was that I... learned some things about my family history, but I didn't quite connect it to the Constitution at the time. I didn't know how to make those connections. Heidi learned about this legacy of abuse and her family during those years, but it took nearly two decades for her to really start to understand how it all fit together. And in that understanding, all of her ideas about the Constitution were challenged. I don't even know where to begin except to say, that the Constitution has profoundly shaped my life. I feel like it's a document that has protected me and completely failed me and so many other people in this country. And so she turned that profound engagement with the document into a play to share with thousands of people, whose dialogue explores what exactly the founding fathers created and meant to create back in 1787. A group of magicians got together on a sweltering summer day in Philadelphia and they wanted to kill each other, but instead they sat down together and they performed a collective act of ethical visualization. Or as I like to call it, a spell. Today on the show, we're talking about the Constitution of the United States with Heidi Schreck, someone who's spent a lot of time sorting through the promises of the Constitution, how it works, and how it's impacted subsequent generations of Americans. That's coming up after a quick break. When Heidi Schreck started writing, and something fun. You know one of those like great movies about like girl debaters that's sort of uplifting and really fun and funny. That was the original idea. Take the prompt of the actual contest she used to do as a teenager which was to draw a personal connection between her own life and the Constitution but do that with the wisdom and hindsight that only adult Heidi could bring to the table. Because when she was 15, drawing those personal connections, sounded like, you know, I protested