Our Chief Danger The story of the democratic movements that the framers of the U.S. Constitution feared and sought to suppress. Liberty Bell Brought to Allentown (detail from mural study for Allentown, Pennsylvania Post Office), by Gifford Beal, 1938. Smithsonian American Art Museum, transfer from the General Services Administration, 1974. On the morning of May 29, 1787, in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, opened the meeting that would become known as the Constitutional Convention by identifying the underlying cause of various problems that the delegates of thirteen states had assembled to solve. “Our chief danger,” Randolph declared, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” None of the separate states’ constitutions, he said, had established “sufficient checks against the democracy.”