Civics In A Year
What do you really know about American government, the Constitution, and your rights as a citizen?
Civics in a Year is a fast-paced podcast series that delivers essential civic knowledge in just 10 minutes per episode. Over the course of a year, we’ll explore 250 key questions—from the founding documents and branches of government to civil liberties, elections, and public participation.
Rooted in the Civic Literacy Curriculum from the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University, this series is a collaborative project supported by the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Each episode is designed to spark curiosity, strengthen constitutional understanding, and encourage active citizenship.
Whether you're a student, educator, or lifelong learner, Civics in a Year will guide you through the building blocks of American democracy—one question at a time.
Civics In A Year
The Crucial Role of Federalist Papers
The Federalist Papers served as crucial persuasive documents during the Constitution's ratification debates, particularly for securing New York's pivotal approval, without which many feared the entire system would collapse. Dr. Beienberg explains how these essays engaged with sophisticated criticisms from writers like Brutus in respectful intellectual debate rather than dismissive rhetoric.
• Each state needed to ratify the Constitution for it to take effect independently
• Rhode Island and North Carolina briefly existed as independent countries while holding out
• New York's ratification was considered essential despite its being identified as a "small state"
• Brutus, a legally trained critic, eloquently voiced concerns shared by many Americans
• The Federalist Papers specifically addressed New York audiences, often referencing their state constitution
• Taking skeptics seriously proved more effective than Pennsylvania's dismissive approach
• Both Federalists and Constitution skeptics shared common ground on fundamental American values
• Brutus and Hamilton both acknowledged judicial review existed in the Constitution, disagreeing only on its merits
Join us on December 1st for our episode on Marbury v. Madison, in which we'll explore judicial review in greater depth.
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School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership
Hello everyone. We again are talking about the Federalist Papers today and we have Dr Beinberg back with us. If you missed episode 38, dr Beinberg introduced the Federalist Papers and talked about why they were written. But, dr Beinberg, today we're kind of digging into why the Federalist Papers were so crucial during the Constitution's ratification. So what was it about these pieces of writing? Right, that I think anybody who has heard the musical Hamilton, seen the musical they know. You know these famous lines about 85 essays. But why were they so crucial during the Constitution's ratification?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 2:So ratification of the Constitution for it to go into effect and succeed, the Articles of Confederation required any state that wanted to participate to independently ratify it. It's not like they took a giant poll of the entire country, and in fact one of the things that we'll talk about in a session focusing on Federalist 39 is it's not even clear to what extent the United States is a single country for all legal purposes. This is a very divided, complicated system of federalism, but any individual state that wants in has to ratify it. Specifically, the Constitution will go into effect if a super majority ratifies, but then that's not binding on any state that doesn't participate. So, just as a sort of fun aside, for example, rhode Island doesn't ratify for quite a while and they're their own little country. Briefly, and at one point George Washington is this again after the Constitution has gone into effect. But Rhode Island and North Carolina are holdouts. They're, briefly, independent countries. North Carolina is basically waiting for the Bill of Rights there or evidence that the Bill of Rights is moving and Rhode Island is holding out. For longer, rhode Island had been a notorious troublemaker in the articles of Confederation days because their problems with the articles that had been more or less unanimously recognized. So but this is sort of last little bit on this kind of fun aside before I get back to the core.
Speaker 2:Little bit on this kind of fun aside, before I get back to the core. Rhode Island actually gets mad because George Washington is going to do sort of a visit through the column in the now states. They've been states for a while but he's going to basically go through and visit a bunch of states and they say, well, general Washington, like you're not coming to visit us? And the federal government more or less says, yeah, this is the domestic tour. If you'd like the foreign policy tour, get in line. If you'd like to be part of the domestic tour, then you can ratify the Constitution. And there's some trade politics that are happening too.
Speaker 2:But yeah, rhode Island is an independent country for a while, implicitly sort of sheltered by the United States, but an independent country nonetheless, implicitly sort of sheltered by the United States, but an independent country nonetheless. But that actually illustrates why the Federalist Papers are important or why the ratification debates were important, because you're sort of laughing like Rhode Island is tiny, who cares? But a universe where New York does the same thing is potentially a real problem Again, new York is not one of the biggest, is not the biggest colony. It's sort of intermediate to small size. They certainly identify as a small state in many of the constitutional debates, but it's centrally located. It has a very critical port. It's part of why the British were so focused on it during the revolution itself. And so even if the constitution legally goes into effect without New York, they recognize they sort of need it to keep the union bridge, to keep this thing functional.
Speaker 2:And one of the problems in New York and some of the states that are quite divisive in terms of getting ratification approved, some are not very hard, but New York has some of the most thoughtful and eloquent critics, particularly, as we talked about in one of the earlier podcasts, brutus, who is clearly legally trained in some capacity. Legal scholars sort of go back and forth on who it is, but the point is he was really smart and really competent and he was able to voice. He was able to eloquently voice what almost all Americans believed a good constitution should look like. And so, as I talked about in that earlier podcast, the Federalist Papers in effect are often saying we agree with what a good government should look like. We just think our constitution secures it. So they're meeting on those grounds. So Brutus is going through in New York newspapers and other people are making similar critiques, saying why this constitution particularly is going to overly empower the federal government, why this constitution will be basically aristocratic instead of Republican. And Brutus has potentially enough people who agree with him that New York's ratification looks seriously in doubt and the fear is, if New York goes down, that eventually the entire system will potentially go under, and so getting New York on board is seen as absolutely critical by the folks who are defending the Constitution are fairly well-coordinated. They're trading letters in some cases, or trading arguments. So the federalist papers pick up some of James Wilson's arguments from Pennsylvania, so those are circulating around.
Speaker 2:What happened in Massachusetts? They're conversing about that. Massachusetts is another state that very narrowly passes, very, very narrowly passes. So John Hancock and others are. That's a sort of its own really interesting story. But they know what it's like for it to come through close Some of the conventions they even sort of terminate them before they're able to lose a vote, and so they want to get New York through.
Speaker 2:And so the Federalist Papers are refuting Brutus and others, mostly Brutus. There are some others that are a little less eloquent and you can see they're a little less respectful than they are of Brutus. But it's basically a sort of point by point. Brutus says the judiciary is bad because X, and this is why it's going to be bad for New Yorkers often particularly. And so there is. You notice that not only do the federalist papers often begin with to the people of New York in whatever newspaper, but they will also often make allusions to the New York Constitution, because they know that people are having that in mind as a model. Sometimes they'll critique it. Oftentimes they'll say hey, you like the New York Constitution. The things you like about the New York Constitution our Constitution actually does. So it's weird for this Brutus guy to be complaining about it. So that's an argument that they make a lot, but it's the fundamental.
Speaker 2:There is some debate among historians now about how widely read any of these documents even were. So there are some who said this didn't end up actually mattering in terms of changing votes. That's sort of impossible to quantify retroactively, like we can't take some sort of retroactive poll on that front. At the very least, at the very very least, the Federalist Papers make the case that the political class can basically buy into the system afterward and say this is actually and it gives them a set of things they can hold them to in terms of promises or explanations and so therefore they can be comfortable signing it.
Speaker 2:So the federalist papers are written late in the entire ratification process because New York is late, but they do sort of send the intellectual signal and the core arguments for New York and other holdouts and similarly a little bit the questions during the ratification. But they're also really important for sort of after the ratification, sort of after the ratification, because they're really their pitch is. We recognize there are basically three groups about thinking away about the Constitution. There are the defenders of the Constitution, there are the hard skeptics who come to be known as the anti-federalists, and that's a really poor term for various reasons. So I like, like the scholar Pauline Mayer, sort of skeptics of the Constitution. But there's a third who are sort of the median voters that you could say, or the pivotal voters, who say we agree with you, the Articles of Confederation is bad, which is a point that even many of the skeptics of the Constitution actually will agree with.
Speaker 2:It's worth noting that there is largely a consensus that the Articles needs a reworking. But the pitch is to the people who are sort of in the middle and say we agree with you, the articles are bad. We keep hearing from Brutus and these other people that this constitution is going to create a whole bunch of new problems. Tell us why that's not the case. That's effectively. The real audience of the Federalist Papers is somebody that's basically says convince me that your Constitution does the things that we all agree we want as a proper free constitutional republic.
Speaker 1:And so you know Brutus. So, brutus, I is a required document for AP government and that can be paired with Federalists I, ix and X, right as kind of a conversation. One nine and 10, right as kind of a conversation, I mean conversation in the 1700s back and forth about what a good government is and what we know what this should look like, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's lots of places, and so one that I assign a lot of in my constitutional law classes is there's even more sort of precise example Brutus 11, 12, and 15 on the judiciary, sort of explaining why this judiciary is going to be a problem, which is a conversation going back and forth in Federalist 78 and 81. So you can sort of slot these in sets where they're again responding, often literally quoting one another as a real conversation. And I think that's actually something that's underappreciated too is that I'm not going to say that certainly every person participating in the constitutional debates was a particularly thoughtful and learned person, but these are actually very serious debates, and one of the mistakes that they make in Pennsylvania is they don't take the skeptics of the Constitution seriously. They're very dismissive. They even like try to get their records sort of left out of the convention record so that it looks like it's unanimous, and so this is obviously a bad bit of optics if you're trying to say, hey, we're the defenders of the Constitution, we take liberty seriously, but you're so stupid we don't even want to pretend you exist. Bad idea.
Speaker 2:So Massachusetts very much takes the opposite perspective, where they take the skeptics seriously. They say we recognize your concerns. In fact we'll pass them up the chain. Some of them we agree with. Some of them we agree that this would be a problem. We just don't think the Constitution does it stochastically sort of buy in after the fact where they say, look, we lost the vote, but we hope to be wrong. In effect, we hope to be wrong. We hope this constitution is exactly like you've been promising us and the New Yorkers recognize that the Massachusetts move of taking them seriously and engaging in a respectful intellectual debate on the merits of this constitution is preferable to just sort of name calling them as a bunch of idiots or hicks, which is how some people have then come to sort of retroactively think of the skeptics of the constitution. But in many ways they're actually quite right about concerns about possible future evolutions in government. Now, whether that's because the constitution itself wasn't actually followed, that's a separate question, but they're actually very, very thoughtful and sophisticated documents.
Speaker 1:And how lucky are we that we get to see that back and forth and these conversations, you know that are being had through these writings, because I never had thought to do Brutus 11, 12 and 15 on the judiciary with federalist 78 and 81. And that's it's just an interesting way to kind of overview to how to look at these things and how people were thinking. And I think that the anti-federalists or I like what you say a little bit better, the skeptics of the Constitution, you know they have really great ideas. Going back and forth shows that dialogue that needed to happen in order to start our Constitution and kind of these debates. And it's hard now because we don't see that right. We see a lot of things on social media and they're quicker and unfortunately there is a lot of the name calling and things like that. Just stop, especially as we get close to Constitution Day. Stop and look at how these debates were had and why that makes our country what it is today.
Speaker 2:And I think it's also worth noting, and I don't want to overstate the point. But there are places. But I think one of the things that I find that I find this is just me, others will disagree with this I think there is actually a lot more agreement between the Federalists and the skeptics of the Constitution. That part of why I think they're so intellectually compelling is they're actually arguing within common grounds for common objectives. They're not just ships sailing past each other in the night, and I think that I don't want. I mean there's disagreement between Madison and Hamilton on some things, right, so I don't want to.
Speaker 2:I don't want to say like everybody agreed on everything, but I think there's something that's striking about the consensus of we fought a revolution. We take seriously this idea of a limited constitutional government that privileges. That privileges political freedoms, political participation, right, there's agreement on these things that these are sort of basic American goods, the exact institutional arrangement that follows. We can quibble with. But then there are also even just going back to the judicial review point, one of the things that I think is really striking and why I like the debate. Brutus basically says this is a hobby horse of mine, as you've heard in other scenarios, liz, but we have this narrative that Marbury v Madison invents judicial review, and we'll talk more about that later.
Speaker 1:We will do an episode on that. We will do that later. Everybody needs to hear this episode.
Speaker 2:One thing that's striking is Brutus basically says judicial review is in this constitution and this gives me the following worries. And Hamilton in response says judicial review is in this constitution and you shouldn't be worried about it because X, y and Z. But this actually means that we can at least get basically a consensus that judicial review is in fact in this constitution. Now, there aren't that many places that you see that, but there are plenty of them where you can say this is what's in it. Do we like it or do we not like it?
Speaker 1:But again, particularly for trying to adjudicate constitutional interpretation, those moments when you can see that are really helpful and there's often a lot of conversation about you know what was the founder's intention and how lucky are we that we get to look back and see. You know, not only within these papers but in you know the constitutional like the convention debates on. You know what the intention essentially was. Dr Meilenberg, thank you. I am so excited to dive into the Federalist Papers and for anybody listening, the Marbury versus Madison episode will be December 1st. I definitely think that you should tune in because it is kind of I feel like a fun back and forth that Dr Beinberg and I have, because we come from two different worlds and I will say that you have definitely changed my mind on a couple of things, but that's not until December. So thank you, dr Beinberg.
