Following the 1906 midterm elections, Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge was excited to return to Washington to introduce a bill that would prohibit child labor in the nation\u27s factories, mines, and mills. He hoped the bill would curtail the unpopular practice and help rebrand his Republican Party as the nation\u27s progressive party. The Party\u27s old guard, however, proved uncooperative. Recognizing the unpopularity of child labor, they fought the bill on constitutional grounds and challenged Beveridge with a parade of horribles. If Congress could constitutionally regulate child labor, they asked, could it not also regulate the hours or wages of adults? Could it not prevent a man from joining a labor union? Or require it? One would have expected Beveridge—who opposed such regulations—to blunt that criticism with some legal distinction. Instead, he embraced it. Would Beveridge go so far as to claim that Congress could prohibit the interstate shipment of cotton picked by children, asked one Senator. “Yes,” Beveridge retorted, “or [by] a redheaded girl.

Although originalism’s emergence as an important theory of constitutional interpretation is usually attributed to efforts by the Reagan administration, the role the theory played in the South’s determined resistance to civil rights legislation in the 1960s actually helped create the Reagan coalition in the first place. North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin Jr., the constitutional theorist of the Southern Caucus, developed and deployed originalism because he saw its potential to stymie civil rights legislation and stabilize a Democratic coalition under significant stress. Ervin failed in those efforts, but his turn to originalism had lasting effects. The theory helped Ervin and other conservative southerners explain to outsiders and to themselves why they shifted from support for an interventionist state powerful enough to enforce segregation to an ideology founded on individual rights and liberty. It thus eased the South’s integration with the emerging New Right.

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There is a sharp separation between the scholarly literature of originalists and professional historians. Originalists cite one another, but regularly ignore recent work by historians. Historians are generally happy to return the favor. Engagement between the two communities is too often limited to methodological disputes and amicus briefs. As a result, historical inquiry offers less to constitutional law than it might, and constitutional lawyers offer less to history than they could. Some of this separation is due to unavoidable methodological tension, but those tensions have not always frustrated productive dialogue. Originalism, in fact, emerged as an important theory of constitutional interpretation because of developments in professional historiography. Post-Revisionist approaches to the historiography of Reconstruction inspired and legitimated the book that set originalism on its current trajectory: Raoul Berger's Government by Judiciary. The revolution in the historiography of the founding embodied in Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic offered originalists other opportunities. It was not methodological disagreements but technological, institutional, and disciplinary developments since the 1980s that separated history and originalism. Those trends have mostly accelerated in the twenty-first century, but the role historians played in creating originalism suggests opportunities for productive dialogue still exist and should be pursued.

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