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The Constitution of Arizona (1910) was written from October to December of 1910. Following the Arizona-New Mexico Enabling Act of 1910, 52 delegates from twelve counties met in Phoenix to draft the state’s foundational text.

Rather than starting with single, coherent set of propositions (such as the Virginia Plan in the 1787 Federal Constitutional Convention), the Arizona Convention approached constitution-writing with a more open proposition format. Individual delegates presented propositions on specific subjects, which were numbered and referred to standing committees established to consider the propositions relevant to their subject of expertise. These committees prepared reports on the propositions in which they recommended indefinite postponement, adoption, amendment, or a substitute proposition on the same subject. These reports were then referred to the Convention to be taken up in the Committee of the Whole. The Committee of the Whole considered the standing committee reports and drafted its own reports to either adopt the recommendation of the standing committee report or to offer its own recommendation. The Convention then voted to adopt or reject the Committee of the Whole recommendation. If the proposition was not indefinitely postponed at this stage, it was referred to the Committee on Style to be amended and/or engrossed. If the Convention approved these changes, the proposition returned to the Committee on Style for incorporation into the draft Constitution.

To construct the Quill timeline, the editors consulted a number of primary sources, including the Records of the Constitutional Convention, the Minutes of the Arizona Constitutional Convention, and the Arizona Republican. A full list of source materials can be found on the “Full Record” view. Where relevant, multiple sources have been used to corroborate the events in a timeline. Future iterations of this project could incorporate the accounts of the proceedings published in other contemporary newspapers as well.

From these sources, the editors have reconstructed a robust view of the daily proceedings of the Convention and the Committee of the Whole. As is common of state constitutional conventions, the standing and select committee records do not survive. In many cases, the only evidence of a committee’s proceedings is the text of its final report as it was entered onto the journal of the Convention. In these instances, the committee sessions have been recreated based on reports and debates that were delivered in the Convention. In order to avoid implying that sittings occurred on days where there is no evidence to suggest that was the case, the standing committee sessions have been created to align with the days on which they reported to the Convention.

Much to the particular disappointment of modern scholars on the Arizona Constitution, the records of the Committee on Style are missing. Based on the debate in the Records of the Arizona Constitutional Convention, it is clear that the committee made a number of substantive changes to several propositions after their final reading. However, the substance of these changes does not survive.

The lack of reports as well as intermediary copies of propositions and the draft Constitution necessitated some difficult editorial choices. For example, the editors chose not to represent the engrossment of propositions. Rather, the text is shown as engrossed as the articles of the draft Constitution are adopted. These editorial decisions are indicated by editors' notes within the timeline.

To create the draft of the Constitution, the editors compared the text of the agreed propositions with the text of the version of the Constitution that was signed by the delegates and the amendments described in the Records and the Minutes. The amendments agreed by the Convention were subtracted from the text of the final version and supplemented with the texts of the propositions as modelled in Quill in order to arrive at an iteration of a draft. Upon close reading of the Records, it is clear that the individual articles of the draft came up for consideration as they returned from the printer. The editors have attempted to re-create the order and groupings in which the articles were presented to the Convention by proposing the Constitution in a four-part draft.

An interesting finding that resulted from this exercise is that the Committee on Style did not include the entire texts of the agreed propositions in the draft. Certain provisions, such as Section 29 of Substitute Proposition Number 94 on the right of workers to organize, were excluded from the draft by the committee. This proposition was eventually incorporated into the Constitution as Article II.

The Arizona Constitutional Convention was uniquely fragmentary in its proposition format and utilized an exceptionally complicated committee approach. Over 150 propositions and pieces of proposed constitutional text filtered through the various committees of the Convention. This procedure is captured in a document event’s “Related Events” tab. A more general overview of documents’ journeys throughout the Convention is provided by the “Calendar View”.

LDJ
Senior Documentary Editor
Quill Project
Pembroke College, Oxford.
February 2023.