We’ll be celebrating the national observance of Law Day (www.lawday.org) on May 1. Issuing the first presidential proclamation in 1958, Dwight Eisenhower characterized Law Day as a “day of national dedication to the principle of government under laws.”
Looking ahead, next year will be the 50th anniversary of the first Law Day. In preparation for this milestone, we have been trying to gather a half century’s worth of memorabilia and documents. Our friends at the Law Library of Congress have been helping us by putting together a complete collection of proclamations issued not just by President Eisenhower, but by every president for every year from 1958 on. Reading through these proclamations, I was struck by what a fascinating collection of historical documents they are. I’d like to share some of what I found, starting with the earliest proclamations.
It’s no coincidence that Law Day is celebrated on May 1 each year. Its origins clearly date to the Cold War era and one of the primary aims of “Law Day U.S.A.” was, in John Kennedy’s words from 1963, to “become the significant answer to Communism’s May Day demonstrations.” Still, both Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy used their proclamations to make more fundamental appeals to the primacy of the rule of law and its connection to world peace.
Perhaps thinking of domestic as well as international contexts, the Eisenhower proclamation of 1959 begins with a plea that “free people can assure the blessings of liberty for themselves only if they recognize the necessity that the rule of law shall be supreme and that all men shall be equal before the law.” Remember that Eisenhower called out federal troops during the school integration crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas in September 1957—around the time that ABA President Charles Rhyne, an ardent civil rights advocate, was conceiving Law Day.
In Kennedy’s 1963 proclamation—clearly mindful of still fresh events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962—he reflects: “In a time when all men are properly concerned lest nations, forgetting law, reason, and moral existence, turn to mutual destruction, we have all the more need to work for a day when law may govern nations as it does men within nations…when the moral development of the human race may assure us of a peaceful and law-abiding world.”
By the middle of Lyndon Johnson’s term as president, we see a different emphasis in the Law Day proclamations of 1967 and 1968, a time when the nation, and the president, wrestled with domestic issues of civil disobedience, struggles for equal justice, “white resistance,” and violent confrontations in the streets.
Consider this eloquent language from LBJ’s 1967 Law Day proclamation, in which he speaks directly to Americans in the first person: “I ask every American to take the law into his heart—not into his hands.” He adds, “I ask not blind obedience, but enlightened obedience. I ask patience, too, for the law, like our times, will and must change. But America’s fidelity to the law must be eternal.”
The next year’s proclamation from Johnson picks up this theme again, but deepens the emphasis on law as a democratic instrument for constructive social change: “The law we recognize and respect is not the mere exercise of power. It is not just a device to enforce the status quo. Law is a process of continuous growth that allows the creation of new rights for all men through a deliberative, democratic process…without recourse to self-defeating violence.”
With the benefit of historical perspective, we can see how—within a shared framework underscoring the importance of the rule of law—these remarkable proclamations from Law Day’s first decade reveal key issues of the day. They serve as time capsules, showcasing the attitudes and values the various presidents expressed towards the law and the rule of law.
Now, I’d like to ask you to imagine you’re the president of the United States.
If you were writing this year’s Law Day proclamation, what issues of our day would you want to highlight? How do they relate to law and how does law relate to them? Do you think some of the issues addressed and values expressed by Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson are relevant today? How would you want future generations to read your proclamation?
Howard Kaplan
The views expressed in this posting are those of the author and have not been approved by the House of Delegates or the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association and, accordingly, should not be construed as representing the policy of the American Bar Association.