Independence Day: Reexamining America's Core Ideals

07-05-2014

Independence Day began for me at the Nantucket Unitarian Universalist Meeting House where a packed crowd braved an impending hurricane to hear a reading of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights alongside some vigorous patriotic singing. I had never heard the Declaration read aloud before, but one recalls that it is a declaration and meant to be read. Also striking is that the bulk of the Declaration is concerned with listing the ills and wrongs suffered at the hands of King George.

Hearing the list of felt wrongs, I was struck by the predominance the issue of governance took over that of economic and individual rights. One hears so much of the Boston Tea Party and “taxation without representation,” but specific complaints about taxation are far down the list of King George’s violations; instead, the vast majority of complaints concern the King’s failure to allow the colonists to govern themselves well and enjoy the fruits of good government. Here is the beginning of the enumerated wrongs listed in the Declaration of Independence (taken from the transcription on the National Archives Website).

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:?For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: …

The justifications given for declaring independence is overwhelmingly the right to good government. There are certainly worries about the quartering of soldiers and individual liberties, but above all the issue is good government. The Continental Congress, filled with many who had served in colonial legislators, was concerned with questions of governance and the right and responsibility to govern well. Quite simply, the King had governed his colonies badly. He closed legislatures, voided acts by colonial legislators, and prevented the passage of necessary laws. In short, the King frustrated the colonists’ attempt to institute a responsive and just government.

[caption id="attachment_13609" align="aligncenter" width="400"] King George III[/caption]

Such a complaint is articulated in what is traditionally thought to be the second sentence of the most famous paragraph of the Declaration.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This bulky sentence asserts the right to self-government and, as importantly, a government that works to make life better for all people. Possibly because of its length, but also maybe for ideological reasons, it is recalled less frequently and less reverently than the famous first sentence:

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.

“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” have come to represent the inalienable rights that Americans elevate above all others, the core of those inalienable rights for which the colonists fought and struggled. Especially at a time when Americans are so disdainful of government and when the Tea Party has articulated an opposition to government and taxation as central features of American freedom, the focus on this iconic sentence has lent support to an ideological view of freedom that privileges individual and economic rights over the right of a people to good government.

Might it be, however, that our understanding of the Declaration of Independence and thus also of the core American Freedoms has been misled by a mistaken transcription of Jefferson’s original prose? That is the fascinating, and apparently well-supported argument made by Danielle Allen in her new book Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. Allen, one of the nation’s preeminent political thinkers (and one of our keynote speakers at the 2013 Arendt Center Conference, Failing Fast), argues that the period typically inserted between the first sentence on inalienable individual liberties and the second sentence on the right to good government is not there in the actual “Declaration of Independence.” In short, when Jefferson invoked those “self-evident” and “inalienable” rights of “all” men, he did not intend only the rights of equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but also the right to good government.

In an essay in the New York Times about Allen’s investigative work, Jennifer Schuessler writes

The period creates the impression that the list of self-evident truths ends with the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” [Allen] says. But as intended by Thomas Jefferson, she argues, what comes next is just as important: the essential role of governments — “instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” — in securing those rights.

“The logic of the sentence moves from the value of individual rights to the importance of government as a tool for protecting those rights,” Ms. Allen said. “You lose that connection when the period gets added.”

Correcting the punctuation, if indeed it is wrong, is unlikely to quell the never-ending debates about the deeper meaning of the Declaration of Independence. But scholars who have reviewed Ms. Allen’s research say she has raised a serious question.

Punctuation is not destiny and even if Allen is proven correct her research is not likely to change the way Americans view their freedoms or their government. But on the Fourth of July it is helpful to recall that the foundational document and basic ideas of American freedom are not limited to our justly cherished individual liberties. It also includes the right and responsibility to good government.

The focus on good government was central to the founders. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the first Federalist:

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

And this focus on good government was, much more so than the Bill of Rights, the core of Hannah Arendt’s veneration for the American Constitution. In her book On Revolution, Arendt argues that the greatest American contribution to governance was not to be found in the Bill of Rights but instead in the abolition of sovereignty, the Federalist structure of the Constitution according to which a strengthened Federal power balanced the States and the States were granted continued powers to balance the Federal government. If power emerges from people acting together, the key achievement of the American Constitution was its sanctioning of multiple power sources, local, state, and federal institutions, all of which would gather people together to form competing, balancing, and limiting realms of power. In such a contest of increasing power, Arendt believed, no one institution would dominate. As long as citizens saw their participation in the diverse institutions of government as a participation in institutions of power, their engagement would preserve the public freedom that was at the heart of the American experiment in self-government.

[caption id="attachment_13613" align="aligncenter" width="500"] In 1620, the Mayflower Compact became the first governing document of Plymouth Colony.[/caption]

Understood in this way, the great failure of American Constitutional government is less an assault on individual liberties than the loss of multiple and dispersed institutions where citizens can and do act together to empower themselves to bring about good government. Eliminating a mistaken period in the Declaration of Independence will not restore American democracy; but it may help initiate a conversation about those basic ideals of freedom and good government as the core American values.

On this holiday weekend, it is worth reading again the Declaration of Independence. Look too at Jennifer Schuessler’s essay and order Danielle Allen’s book. Finally, take a moment to register for the upcoming Arendt Center Conference: The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?

--RB