NAN A. S. HAYWORTH: “the challenge for us, and to the cynics who will be there, the bromide is this, oh, they want to turn the clock back.…”

“the challenge for us, and to the cynics who will be there, the bromide is this, oh, they want to turn the clock back. That will be the accusation that comes from the guardians of the old order who always look to concentrate power in Washington and also look askance at individual responsibility. We should hasten to point out that indeed we are building a sense of community in part because of the medium of television, the fact that indeed we have a community across America watching us, that is one of the advantages. But there are many different things that change in our society. The one thing that should not is the subject of another letter I received. Folks from my district in Arizona writing and agreeing that we have to return to this document, the Constitution of the United States. This is a remarkable document. An historian characterized this in a book called the Miracle at Philadelphia, that we have this document that is here and all-encompassing and can deal with different times and different changes. So whether it was the rise of television or, as some theorists purport, the creation of centralized air-conditioning that kept government in business year round, there are changes that come to our society. But the danger for us is to ignore this document the Constitution or moreover, as the gentleman from Illinois suggests, to dismiss the notion of community.”