Tomorrow will be the 250th anniversary of the “shot heard ‘round the world” that began the American Revolution. Next year, the Declaration of Independence, and with it our nation, turns 250.
How should we celebrate?
This anniversary is not simply an occasion for a nationwide party with hot dogs and apple pie. The events that we commemorate set the stage for a new nation that, for the first time in history, would be based not on ethnicity or religion or geography, but on striving for democratic principles. The American Revolution was a world-changing event.
The 250th anniversary is a wonderful opportunity to remember and reinvigorate those principles.
Today, though, some are reluctant to celebrate the revolution and America’s founding because the Founders failed, miserably, to implement the principles that they articulated. Most obviously, many of the men who issued a solemn Declaration that “all men are created equal” kept their fellow human beings in bondage; their treatment of Native Americans and women adds to the concerns.
The Founders’ failure to live up to their stated principles is also true for many of the other basic democratic principles: By 1798, in spite of the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of the press and speech, scores of people were being jailed for criticizing the president or Congress under the Sedition Act.
For years, America’s leaders struggled with freedom of religion. James Madison, often called the father of the Bill of Rights, complained that Congress violated the First Amendment when it hired a chaplain. He said if members wanted religious sustenance, they should pay for it themselves, not with tax dollars.
Some states required a religious oath to hold office until 1961, when the Supreme Court finally struck that down.
There seems to be an almost endless supply of other examples, leading to shouts of “hypocrites” and calls to bury, if not denigrate, that revolutionary history.
But, without minimizing the failures, there is also a danger in focusing exclusively on the Founders’ shortcomings.
Abraham Lincoln recognized this as the Civil War loomed. He wrote “the principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society,” but he also knew that America, and Jefferson, did not conform to the most important principle: “All men are created equal.”
Not only did they fail to abide by that principle, but it was “denied and evaded, with no small show of success.”
Some essentially celebrated those failings, apologists for slavery. “One dashingly calls [Jefferson’s principles] ‘glittering generalities.’ Another bluntly calls them ‘self-evident lies,’ and others insidiously argue that they apply to ‘superior races.’”
The failures became not simply a reproach, but seemed to validate the idea that the principles must be mere generalities, not meant to be implemented, or that only a superior race could do so. Rather than a demand that we strive harder, work more forcefully to implement the democratic principles, they became a reason to question the legitimacy of the principles themselves.
Lincoln saw the danger in such pervasive negativism, calling them “the vanguard, the miners and sappers of returning despotism.” Fixation on the failures could blind us to the power of the principles. Despotism, tyranny and slavery for millions was the threatened result.
But there is another, more powerful story intertwined with the failures. Those principles, in spite of the Founders’ falling short, were “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression,” Lincoln explained.
And so the women at Seneca Falls in 1848, gathering to demand the rights that were forcefully denied to them (including by Jefferson), quoted the Declaration of Independence. Frederick Douglass denounced slavery, quoting Jefferson and the declaration. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers were still quoting the declaration as they demanded to be treated with equity.
Millions, here and around the world, have, in spite of those failures, quoted Jefferson and the U.S. Declaration to demand their own rights and to fight for the equality that so many have been denied.
Today, we continue to fall short and to struggle for equality, religious freedom, freedom of speech, voting rights and other essential elements of a functioning democracy. Yet, thousands of people from around the world take the U.S. oath of citizenship every year not because they are unaware of those shortcomings, but because they believe the principles are worth fighting for nonetheless.
So the 250th anniversary is an opportunity. We can both celebrate those aspirational democratic principles on which this nation was founded while recognizing the failings, as both good history and justice demand. It is also our chance to rededicate ourselves to striving for those principles.
Today, facing many challenges, we can recommit our nation to freedom of speech and press, freedom of religion (Jefferson said American religious freedom was for the “Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination,”), voting rights for all citizens, separation of powers in the government and other key democratic values.
Martin Luther King famously wrote and preached that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But King also knew that the arc was not smooth and never seemed to reach its goal. He warned that change “comes through continuous struggle.”
So it is with democratic principles. Americans who have fought and died over two and a half centuries to protect democratic doctrines understood that. All of us still need to remember it.
With such an understanding, there is much to celebrate.
John A. Ragosta, Ph.D., was formerly a historian and interim director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. His most recent book is “For the People, For the Country: Patrick Henry’s Final Political Battle.”
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