HAPPY 4TH OF JULY
Do you read Heather Cox Richardson’s blog, Letters from an American? It’s brilliant, but her piece on the 4th of July is one of her most stirring.
July 3, 2022
And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous slavery by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.
America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.
What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, and Irish were locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.”
“Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include Black men, men of color, and eventually to include women.
But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle, as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Words to live by in 2022.
I was born in the 1950s and I’m one of these white-haired ladies. It’s important to remember, too, that those early founders largely represented slave-holding interests. We are being misled again by some with power and wealth.
I was ten years into starting my own business when The Apprentice first launched, and I was thrilled at the opportunity to learn from a successful businessman. I read the book, and my office staff and I even bet on who would be fired this week! It can be hard to see a huckster for what he is. But that seems to be a big part of our job as citizens in a country created by this radical declaration.
It can be discouraging to keep fighting for what seems so simple and clear. I think we need to get back to basics. You know another document stated it even more simply, “Love they neighbor as theyself.”
A respondent to Heather Cox Richardson’s post cited this note from Dan Rather.
"What we should celebrate on the Fourth is less what happened on that day in 1776 and more what followed. Our Founding Fathers, deeply flawed though many of them were, set in motion a revolution in thought that far exceeded their imaginations. The principles they defined, once documented in writing, ceased to be theirs to own and shape. That people like Frederick Douglass, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a century later, should seek to narrow the chasm between our aspiration and our reality is as much a part of July 4 as faded words on parchment.
And that could be a guide for us today. We, as individuals and as a people, can choose not to let those who will divide us define this day. We can choose not to let those who seek to disassemble our progress determine our path forward; not to allow the forces of intolerance, autocracy, and lawlessness to claim our star-spangled banner."
Dan Rather