Orchestra 2001

Legacy Campaign After Charles Ives

(1874-1954)

Charles Ives on the Constitution and Politics:

Ives proposed in 1920 that there be a 20th amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would authorize citizens to submit legislative proposals to Congress. Members of Congress would then cull the proposals, selecting 10 each year as referendums for popular vote by the nation's electorate. He even had printed at his own expense several thousand copies of a pamphlet on behalf of his proposed amendment. The pamphlet proclaimed the need to curtail “THE EFFECTS OF TOO MUCH POLITICS IN OUR representative DEMOCRACY.” He planned to distribute the pamphlets at the 1920 Republican National Convention, but they arrived from the printer after the convention had ended.

It is stated in the biographical film A Good Dissonance Like a Man that the first of Ives's crippling heart attacks occurred as a result of a World War I era argument with a young Franklin D. Roosevelt over his idea of issuing of war bonds in amounts as low as $50 each. Roosevelt was chairman of a war bonds committee on which Ives served, and he “scorned the idea of anything so useless as a $50 bond.” Roosevelt changed his mind about small contributions as seen many years later when he endorsed the March of Dimes to combat polio.

(Source: Wikipedia)