Given the recent financial turmoil the country has experienced, for this month’s Moment in Rotary History, Harpoon newsletters from 1929 on file at the Bentley Historical Library were viewed to see if mention was made of Rotarian perspectives about the stock market crash from that era. Interestingly, no mention was made of the financial upheaval felt around the world during that year. Also, no mention of the stock market crash in 1937 was found in Harpoon newsletters of that year, either. The reasons for omittance of such calamitous events from the Harpoon and minds of Rotarians must then be left to the dust of time.

However, a Harpoon Newsletter on file from May 3 of 1937 offers a revealing window into Rotarians concern for the alarming rise of Nazism during that era and its subsequent destructive challenges to democratic order in this country, and abroad. Paralleling concerns for our constitutional order felt today.

It reads: What is the Constitution?

There is a popular delusion that the Constitution of the United States was created out of nothing. Gladstone gave currency to the idea when he declared it to be “the greatest work ever struck off at any time by the mind of man.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Constitution was the product of long experience. The framers had a thousand years of struggle for self-government from which to choose. Fundamental rights arduously wrested from kings and parliaments and established on many battlefields were put into the Bill of Rights. Into it went freedom of religion, assembly and speech, security of person and home, right of trial by jury, protection against deprivation of life, liberty and property except by due process of law. These things were not revealed to the Fathers in a heavenly vision. They represented the age-old aspirations and achievements of man. The framework of our institutions was drawn from long experience in the colonies and in the homeland of England. The Constitution represented the accumulated wisdom of centuries.
Those who in their zeal for social reform would cut loose from the Constitution will do well to consider its origin. It was born of experience, it has grown through experience, it conforms to experience, and experience can not be lightly disregarded.

How’s that for an echo from the past?

The second page of that 1937 newsletter documents attendance, demonstrating Club attendance is an age-old issue.

Presented by Tom Millard