Delaware Today Magazine: Letter to the Editor

Published December 8, 2011 at 12:41 PM

Dear Delaware Today,

I was enjoying the “first known group portrait of Delaware state legislators” (page 53, November 2011 edition), but soon saw a single sentence accompanying the photo that contains not one but two mistakes. In describing money and politics in the 1880s, it states that “the problems of the 1880s and 1890s led to the rewriting of the U.S. Constitution in 1897, which established direct election of U.S. Senators…”

Ouch!

The U.S. Constitution has never been rewritten, and wasn’t in 1897. The Delaware State Constitution was rewritten in 1897 (and incidentally, is the version we are living with currently). The direct election of U.S. Senators was not established in 1897, but in 1913 by an amendment to the U.S. Constitution (the 17th Amendment).

Otherwise, I enjoyed the bit of history you provided from the Delaware Historical Society.