Bill Caraher |

Every now and then I dip back into the NDQ archive. Not only can it be pleasant to read some of century-old rumination, but it can often feel prescient. Lately, I’ve been contemplating writing a short history of the first “series” of North Dakota Quarterly published between 1910 and 1933. The first step to doing this is to read these volumes.

On a rainy morning this week, I once again waded into the archive and started to read NDQ 1. The first two articles discuss the role of the courts — and specifically the office of the appellate judge — in the US and set against the backdrop of growing influence of labor and wealthy robber barons. Ex-President Teddy Roosevelt leaps off the page “with his disregard for constitutional restrictions, with his lay as opposed to legal mind, and with his keen, almost boisterous, desire to accomplish immediate results regardless of precedent or ultimate legal consequence, in turn chose for the bench those whom he thought would carry out his policies and adhere to his ideals.”

The second article is by the University of North Dakota’s President Frank McVey, and it offers some observations on taxation and government that still resonate. He reminds us, “We used to adhere to the doctrine, and it is still heard, that that state is the best governed that is the least governed, but the passage of many laws that have produced great social betterment has in a measure placed this political theory in the background and we are beginning to recognize that the social phase of government is more important, more essential, than the individualistic phase.”

There is a temptation when reading pieces from over a century ago to fall into complacency when you recognize that the same critiques, concerns, and problems persist today. It is also a reminder that some of these challenges appear to be evergreen in the American system making the work of constant and incisive (and even urgent) critique as important now as it was then.

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Bill Caraher is a field archaeologist which makes him uniquely unqualified to edit a little magazine. But there’s this.

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