What Are We Celebrating on July 4th?

July 4th ... Independence Day ... is fraught with symbolism.  It's the beginning of American exceptionalism, the beginning of America taking its place on the world’s stage, the beginning of freedom and prosperity for Americans.  

There is no question that 1776 marked the beginning of America's feeling that it was exceptional and that its moral voice coupled with its growing economic strength gave it a place on the world’s stage.  But what of freedom and prosperity?

We all know the famous lines from the Declaration of Independence, crafted primarily by Thomas Jefferson ... “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”  

These were truly revolutionary words.  They have given America’s elite something to crow about.  And they have given the mass of Americans, especially the disadvantaged, something to hang their hopes on for more than two centuries.  This was the basis of the American dream.  But what were and are the facts on the ground?

Those that benefitted from our independence were primarily those with business interests, who were now free of the yoke of English taxes and control.   Then as now, business interests were the main “client” of government ... indeed, back then you could only vote if you owned land or had enough wealth to be taxed, so those were the constituents ... and they prospered then as they do now.

As of the first census in 1790, 18% of the US population (700,000 out of 4,000,000) were slaves.  Their status certainly did not change with American independence.  That would have to wait another 85 years for the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation.  Of the Founding Fathers who were slave holders, only George Washington freed his slaves, upon his death.  Jefferson did not even do that.

The status of women ... the wives of the founders and the mothers of their children ... did not change at all with independence.  They remained chattel with no rights for a century, slowly achieving some rights in the later 1800s, and only won the right to vote in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

Over the last century, there can be no question that both women and, to a lesser extent, blacks have improved their status in all areas of American business and life  But there can also be no question that even today neither have reached anything approaching equality with white males and that broad discrimination persists. 

And then there are the Native Americans.  They had a status lower than slaves because they were of no use to anyone.  They were just a heathen barrier to be gotten rid of when their presence interfered with American interests.   Our genocide of the Native American (and what else can it honestly be called) is breathtakingly chilling.   Manifest Destiny had no room for equality.  

And as for general prosperity, while it is true that we all have more now than we did … more education, more modern conveniences, creature comforts … it is also true that there is greater inequality between the richest Americans (top 5%) and the rest then at any time.  If you look at broader groups ... top 20%, middle 40, and bottom 40 ... the income distribution has remained pretty static since independence.  So we really haven’t achieved much of anything on that point.

So what are we celebrating?  Some moving, aspirational words which we have still not managed ... or if truth be told, even tried very hard ... to implement.  As President Obama said, “We can do better.”

We are celebrating the birth of a nation whose unbridled capitalism was able to take full advantage of the opportunities presented by the natural resources of this vast country and a bottomless pool of cheap immigrant labor to make this the richest nation in the world.  We are celebrating a rapacious America which, while being the leader of the free world, despoiled the environment and took advantage of the mass of its powerless citizens, leaving a damaged people and landscape in the wake of “progress.”

Instead of celebrating so hard and patting ourselves on the back for how great America is, we should use this opportunity to rededicate ourselves and our institutions of government to implementing those words of the Declaration of Independence: “that all men are created equal,” “that they have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and that the role of government is to “secure” those rights.  We should never forget that in reality most of our citizens have little cause to celebrate if they stopped to think about it.

New Name - Same Mission

I suddenly have become aware, duh!, that the name I originally created for this blog, Preserving American Greatness, is not really appropriate to its mission statement.  That’s pretty bad for a writer.  But better that realization later than never. 

One problem with the original name is its connotation.  It sounds like the blog is a proponent of American exceptionalism, which it certainly is not, or that it promotes a right wing “America right or wrong” perspective, which also clearly does not apply.  Beyond being misleading, this connotation would naturally be offensive to many people around the world for whom we have long ceased being regarded as “the beacon on the hill.”

The other problem is that although the seeds of greatness are in the American story, our country has unfortunately not fulfilled the promise shown in the Declaration of Independence.  We are certainly a powerful country, the biggest economy in the world, the strongest, or at least biggest, military force in the world.  We have made huge advancements in many different areas.

But on a human level, we have failed rather miserably.  The curse of slavery that was embedded in our founding documents remains with us despite the Civil War, despite all the laws that guarantee equality.  While women have had full rights (well, almost) now for a century, and they have advanced far in the work world, their position vis a vie men is still very unequal in fundamental ways.  People’s attitudes have changed, but only by degree, not fundamentally.  

We live in a most unequal and divided society … not just between black and white Americans, men and women, the rich and most everyone else, but in ways without end.  The promise of “success” (as defined by our culture) is tantalizingly held out to everyone by the marketing media, but for the majority in this country the Declaration’s guarantee of the unalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness” remains a cruel joke.

So just what are America’s values?  To me they are encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence:

“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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”

Greed, a consuming self-interest, and a lack of concern for others may be the values of our contemporary culture, but they are not the values that our Founding Fathers gave America at its birth.  While the words of the Declaration may seem on the surface to champion self-interest and the right to do whatever one wishes, they are tempered by the spiritual statement that we are all created equal and that we all were endowed by the Creator with unalienable rights.  Thus, if the exercise of one person’s right harms another or inhibits his right, then there needs to be a check.  The Declaration does not proclaim an unfettered right to anything.  That would be anarchy.

This is why I wrote the book, We Still Hold These Truths in 2004 (years before the conservative author Matthew Spaulding wrote his take on things under the same title, oddly fulfilling the statement I made on the book’s first page that “in [the Declaration’s] interpretation lies the core of both the Liberal and Conservative ideologies that have run through American political life and the tension between them).  This is why I started this blog several years ago.

This blog is a celebration of those profoundly liberal American values.  It is dedicated to insuring that the promise of the Declaration becomes a reality for all Americans and beyond that, that these values impact our dealings with other nations.  Let me repeat here the mission statement that was my first blog post:

Our nation stands under attack … not from without, but from within.  Both our politics and our culture have been corrupted.

Politics on both the right and left are ever more polarized.  We cannot be a great or strong country if the people and their politicians view fellow Americans who happen to have opposing points of view in an us v them mode, as the enemy; we can only progress if we are united, albeit with differing perspectives on how to go about things.  And our culture caters to the worst aspects of capitalism with ethics and concern for the common good falling to the demands of greed and competition.  The same issues are present throughout much of the world today.

One central aspect of the problem is that our country and much of the world is bereft of spiritual values.  Now right here we have a definitional problem.  I am not referring to the values hawked by born-again Christians in this country, or Islamists in Muslim countries, or the ultra-Orthodox in Israel.   Because interestingly, in almost all cases, the “spiritual” or “moral” positions taken by these self-righteous people go against core tenets of their own religion.  

On the other hand, you have the majority of people, at least in the United States, who claim to believe in God but are not spiritual in any meaningful sense; their lives are totally a creature of contemporary culture.  Their spiritual core is if not empty sorely depleted.

It will be the mission of this blog to look at current events, be they political or cultural, from a spiritual, not religious, perspective, with relevant support from our founding documents, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.   Remember when it was popular for Christians to wear bracelets that said, “What would Jesus do?”  That’s basically the question that this blog asks, but from a larger spiritual perspective.

I will take as my perspective the common teachings that are at the core of the spiritual/moral constructs of all the world’s great religions … Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Greed is the root of all evil.

Put away lying; speak every man truth.

Only when these maxims are followed will we achieve “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” and realize the goals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that “governments are instituted to secure” the equality of all men and their “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

All Men Are Created Equal?

In my writings, I often refer to this iconic phrase from the Declaration of Independence, together with its companion language setting forth our unalienable rights and the statement that government’a purpose is to secure those rights, as the touchstone against which all acts of our government should be judged.  

Yet this very phrase, when viewed as hypocritical because of its obvious disconnect with what was actually happening at the time in the halls of government and in people’s lives, has called into question the intent of the framers and signers of the Declaration.  Was this merely a bold rhetorical flourish to gain acceptance both at home and on the world stage. or was it a deeply held conviction which was meant to chart the future course of the nation?

Not surprisingly, much research and writing has been done on this topic.  And the answers provided are by no means uniformly in one direction or the other.  In truth, the answer is often foretold by the politics of the researcher.  

Because of the enormous importance and potential of these words, to my mind, in redirecting our government and our citizens to a stronger, more just society and nation, I wanted to survey the literature to see what answers I would draw from it.  As objectively as I could, despite my admitted liberal bias.  

First let me restate the obvious.  Slavery was present in the country, both in the south and the north.  The Constitution codified slavery in the “3/5 compromise,” which stated that each slave shall be counted as a 3/5 person when the census was taken to establish the population of each state and thus its representation in Congress.  Thomas Jefferson, who crafted the phrase, was a slaveholder and remained a slaveholder to his death.  All the signers from the South were slaveholders.  

And the problem does not just lie with the fact of slavery.  Women were legally little more than chattel under the total control of their husbands; they had virtually no rights. And in fact, it would take women longer than African-Americans to achieve legal equality and the right to vote. The evidence arguing for a finding of hypocrisy could and has filled up books.

But that is not where this question ends.  Thomas Jefferson and most of the men who were present at these debates and signed the Declaration were men of the enlightenment.   They were men of ideas, and ideas are not always ... actually almost never ... a reflection of the reality of the moment.  Ideas, by their very nature, are meant to chart, to influence the future, whether in science or in human affairs.

In looking at various writings and notes of Jefferson and others, some researchers have thus concluded that what this phrase relates is their belief that all men and women are created equal in the sight of God.  Yet they were all well-aware that the kingdom of God is not to be found on Earth.  And so. like many ideas, it’s inclusion in the Declaration was meant to be an aspirational statement, something to guide the future of the nation.

In our current age, in which the paucity of ideas is reflected everyday in the halls of Congress, in our schools, and in corporate and government offices throughout the country, it is hard to fathom the age of enlightenment and the role that ideas played in bringing about changes in all areas of human activity.  To understand that Jefferson was neither hypocritical nor schizophrenic when writing “all men are created equal,” but rather a man caught in his time who knew, however, that there was something beyond the exigencies of the present, something larger, that needed expression and preservation.  There was no intellectual dishonesty here.

And so the power of the words of the Declaration of Independence remain undiminished.  They should be used to repurpose, to redirect our government and our citizens ... not to something new and unfamiliar, but to something deeply embedded in our founding documents, waiting to be put into action by a nation grounded in social consciousness.

“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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”

What Are We Celebrating on July 4th?

July 4th ... Independence Day ... is fraught with symbolism.  It is the beginning of American exceptionalism, the beginning of America taking its place on the world’s stage, the beginning of freedom and prosperity for Americans.  

There is no question that 1776 marked the beginning of America's feeling that it was exceptional and that it’s moral voice coupled with an unleashed mercantilist strength gave it a place on the world’s stage.  But what of freedom and prosperity?

We all know the famous lines from the Declaration of Independence, crafted primarily by Thomas Jefferson ... “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are the right the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”  These were truly revolutionary words.  They have given America’s elite something to crow about.  And they have given America’s disadvantaged something to hang their hopes on for more than two centuries.  But what were and are the facts on the ground?

Those that benefitted from our independence were primarily those with business interests, who were now free of the yoke of English taxes and control.   Then as now, business interests were the main “client” of government ... indeed, back then you could only vote if you owned land or had enough wealth to be taxed, so those were the constituents ... and they prospered then as they do now.

As of the first census in 1790, 18% of the US population (700,000 out of 4,000,000) were slaves.  Their status certainly did not change with American independence.  That would have to wait another 85 years for the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation.  Of the Founding Fathers who were slave holders, George Washington did free his slaves upon his death.  Jefferson did not even do that.

The status of women ... the wives of the founders and the mothers of their children ... did not change at all with independence.  They remained chattel with no rights for a century, slowly achieving some rights in the later 1800s, and only won the right to vote in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

Over the last century, there can be no question that both women and blacks have improved their status in all areas of American business and life  But there can also be no question that even today neither have reached anything approaching equality with white males and that discrimination persists. 

And then there are the Native Americans.  They had a status even lower than slaves because they were of no use to anyone.  They were just a heathen barrier to be gotten rid of when their presence interfered with American interests.   Our genocide of Native Americans (and what else can it honestly be called) is breathtakingly chilling.   It's justification is closely related to Hitler's "Lebensraum" ... Germany's need for more room to grow.  Manifest destiny has no room for equality.  

And as for general prosperity, while it is true that we all have more now than we did, it is also true that there is greater inequality between the richest Americans (top 5%) and the rest then at any time.  If you look at broader groups ... top 20%, middle 40, and bottom 40 ... the income distribution has remained pretty static since independence.  So we really haven’t achieved much of anything on that point.

So what are we celebrating?  Some very wonderful-sounding words which we have still not managed ... or if truth be told, even tried very hard ... to implement.  We are celebrating the birth of a nation with unbridled mercantilism/captitalism that was able to take full advantage of the opportunities presented by the natural resources of this vast country.  We are celebrating American progress, which has left many damaged lives and souls in its wake.

Is this really cause to celebrate?  Can't we do better in fulfilling America's promise to its people?