This snapshot was gathered in conjunction with the Museum on Main Street program at the Smithsonian Institution and its "Stories from Main Street" initiative. The project is intended to capture Americans' impressions and stories about their small-town and rural neighborhoods, waterways, personal memories, cultural traditions, work histories, and thoughts about American democracy. This story is from a group of narratives inspired by the Smithsonian traveling exhibition, "Voices and Votes: Democracy in America."
Gary Clark (00:00): What does democracy mean to me? Democracy in its rawest form is supposed to mean freedom. The idea that we live in this environment where everybody's rights are respected and things like that. However, in a literal sense, democracy has been described as majority rules, which is not what our republic was founded on. But all that means is two wolves and a lamb arguing what's for dinner. And so that's why the founders, nowhere in the Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence is democracy ever referenced.
(00:48): That's I think one of the things we have to be careful of. And what I learned very early about the whole idea of what our self-governing really meant, and I was a little bit background. I was born and raised in Kansas, heavily German farming community, half Methodist, half Catholic. I actually went to a public school that was taught by Catholic nuns.
(01:20): And back in those days that was not unusual to have that sort of thing. Today it would be very unusual. But one of the things that has, and I relate this story often, sister Joanna, part of the progressing from the seventh grade to the eighth grade was you had to learn the constitution. At that time, Folger's coffee company had a program where if you collect the metal bands that you took off of coffee cans that nobody remembers anymore, and you sent so many of those in, they'd send you a copy of the Constitution. I still have mine.
(01:58): I still carry not that one because it's a little worn. It only has 23 amendments in it. We have 27 now. But she taught us that this is the Bible of your country, and she would test us on it. We had to learn what the foundations of the Republic was really all about. God rest her soul. Every kid that came through that class in my class was only 12 kids. Every kid that came through had to learn the Constitution. And you wonder, and to me that was the foundation of understanding what democracy as it's applied here and what it really means from the foundations of the Constitution. It didn't mean majority rules. The rights of the minority were always respected in all that we were a representative democracy. We were a constitutional republic. And that is totally different.
(02:57): It always bothers me a little bit when you hear people talk about, well, we're a democracy. No, we're a constitutional republic. We're a representative of democracy in to let people know that the idea of majority rules is not embodied in the Constitution in any way. So I don't know if that explains it well enough, what my thoughts, but my thoughts always go back to what are we really all about as a quote/unquote, democracy. And I always equate that to a representative democracy, a constitutional republic.
(03:37): It was Ronald Reagan said that the freedom as we know it is only one generation away from being lost if we're not cognizant of what it's all about. For those of us . . . see, I spent 30 years in uniform, and I've been retired now 25 years. So I'm probably one of the older ones that you'll talk to. But what we learned, and I go back to my story about the sister Joanna and what she emphasized to us from a civic standpoint of what we were supposed to understand and what we're supposed to take away and understand what it was about the country that we were living in.
Find a complete transcript at www.museumonmainstreet.org
Asset ID: 2022.37.11.b
