Clinton Indulges Passion for Past

Somewhere such knowledge must have a place--these details, details, details about the early life of the United States.

One day last week, it resided in the mind of the president himself, who was spouting data and factoids--reveling in information for its own sake--while touring Independence Hall as the nation prepared to celebrate its 224th birthday.

President Clinton was in Philadelphia to speak to a union audience and to sign legislation permitting electronic signatures to replace handwritten ink signatures in the nation’s commerce. (In this setting of quill pens and florid handwriting, that mission seemed jarringly out of place.)

During the tour, he produced a monologue--almost a stream-of-consciousness lecture on history--that eventually prompted his National Park Service guide, Martha Aikens, to declare: “Mr. Clinton, we’re always looking for volunteers.”

Just a slice of the president’s off-the-cuff presentation brings to mind a question. To what use will he put this talent when his audience is gone?

There is, of course, no answer yet to that question. So let’s just look at the president on the day last week when he visited the place from which the Declaration of Independence emerged:

His tour took him to an original copy of the Declaration. “This is the copy for the first public reading,” he announced.

Then he spied a document written by Elbridge Gerry. A signer of the Declaration, Gerry eventually became governor of Massachusetts and later vice president of the United States.

Of course, as every schoolchild and politician knows, Gerry--pronounced with a hard “G,” as in gorge, rather than a “J” as in Jerry--is best known for a political sleight of hand: His name was given to the district-designing practice of gerrymandering. The word (which President Reagan insisted on pronouncing with that hard “G,” then informing all who raised eyebrows that he was correct) is a combination of the politician’s name and the word salamander. This is because the oddly shaped congressional district drawn by gerrymandering resembles the little creature--its boundaries created to strengthen or weaken the chances of a particular political party.

The president’s discourse on gerrymandering (pronounce it as you will) included his report that the practice predated the man whose name it has taken, going back to 18th century Britain.

But on with the president’s tour.

To the cluster of reporters who accompanied him, Clinton asked this: Into which language was the Declaration of Independence first translated?

The answer, which of course he provided, is German, reflecting the large population of German immigrants living at the time in Pennsylvania. With that, the president traced the course of German immigration to the United States (of which his Irish ancestors were not a part).

Milwaukee is the American city with the most German Americans, he said. Before the Civil War, more people in San Antonio spoke German than Spanish. German names took root in Arkansas towns--including the town of Ulm, which, he informed his fellow tourists, happens to be both the greatest rice-producing and duck-hunting county in the U.S. (Others may challenge those assertions.)

“Most people have no idea the role the Germans played in the beginning of the republic,” Clinton said.

Then it was time to pose a question to the president, one of a more current tenor: What does he think of Republican criticism that he is using executive orders to implement policy in a manner reaching beyond that envisioned by the Founding Fathers?

“I do think it’s fair to say there is a more expansive executive now than people envisioned when the Founders came along,” he said. “But the role of government is more expansive too.”

Consider the Louisiana Purchase, executed in 1803 by Thomas Jefferson for $15 million, an amount equal to the entire federal budget at the time. “Can you imagine,” Clinton said, “what the Congress would say if I said I want to buy a little land, but it will only cost $1.8 trillion?”

His verbal meanderings took him to the Emancipation Proclamation, which Clinton presented as an expansion of presidential powers. So too, he said, was President Lincoln’s suspension of the rights of habeas corpus. Clinton then cited the specific case, known in court shorthand as Milligan, to which this step gave rise in the Supreme Court.

It was all about the balance of powers, he said, adding, although it seemed unnecessary, “I think a lot about this.”